They have a dog, whose sudden barking a few minutes into the conversation alerts Foer to the arrival of the meter reader. Foer is married to the writer Nicole Krauss, who will publish her own second novel later in the spring. Instead there is merely the polite, charmingly elusive Jonathan Safran Foer, a novelist more likely to answer questions with anecdotes about the lives of poets and painters than with bold, self-regarding statements about his own life and work. Most loathsome man in the nation? In the hemisphere? The universe? The stinging arrow of literary envy will have to arc extremely high and incredibly long to bring to earth the soaring flight of Foer's very sad and very funny story of nine-year-old Oskar Schell and his grief for his father, a victim of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center.įortunately for BookPage, if an Ogre Foer exists, he is nowhere in evidence during a call to the author's home in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. And it leads one to wonder what further such plaudits lie in wait for an older (he's now 28!), wiser and far more accomplished Foer now that he has published an even more beautiful and brilliant second novel called Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. That's a stunning mound of abuse to be piled on a writer who was barely a whisker past 25. Not long after the publication of his brilliant and widely acclaimed first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer was named one of the 50 most loathsome New Yorkers by a local literary weekly.
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