Jonathan Safran Foer

Philippe Codde (University of Ghent)

Ed. by Christopher Hugh Gair, University of Glasgow
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

Born 21 Feb 1977
Activity 2002-ongoing

Places

Born in United States
Active in United States

Cultural Identities

Jewish American

Activities

Primary

Novelist

Resources

Foer's Works

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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 published in

The Paris Review

Conjunctions

, and

The New Yorker;

two edited volumes of…

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2433 words

Citation: Codde , Philippe. "Jonathan Safran Foer". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 December 2008; last revised 21 December 2010. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12249, accessed 19 April 2024.]

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