At the age of 31, and the author of merely two novels so far, Jonathan Safran Foer has already been hailed as one of the most significant – and controversial – new voices in contemporary American fiction. Critics have both extolled and lambasted his novels for their formally innovative and seemingly irreverent approach to subject matters requiring great gravitas – most conspicuously the historical traumas of the Holocaust and 9/11. An obvious aficionado of postmodernist narrative techniques (or gimmickry, for some), Foer has published two international bestsellers that were translated into more than 30 languages (Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close); some short stories …
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