Books by Jonathan Safran Foer

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Jonathan Safran Foer's debut—"a funny, moving...deeply felt novel about the dangers of confronting the past and the redemption that comes with laughing at it, even when that seems all but impossible." (Time) With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man—also named Jonathan Safran Foer—sets out on a quest into his family history to find the woman who might or might not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war, an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past, in this powerful story of memory and Jewish heritage. As their adventure unfolds in a brilliant dual narrative, Jonathan imagines the history of his grandfather’s village, conjuring a magical fable of startling symmetries that unite generations across time. As his search moves back in time, the fantastical history moves forward, until reality collides with fiction in a heart-stopping scene of extraordinary power. “Imagine a novel as verbally cunning as A Clockwork Orange, as harrowing as The Painted Bird, as exuberant and twee as Candide, and you have Everything Is Illuminated . . . Read it, and you'll feel altered, chastened—seared in the fire of something new.” — Washington Post “A rambunctious tour de force of inventive and intelligent storytelling . . . Foer can place his reader’s hand on the heart of human experience, the transcendent beauty of human connections. Read, you can feel the life beating.” — Philadelphia Inquirer

Jonathan Safran Foer has long had a passion for the work of the twentieth-century American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell. Inspired by Cornell's avian-themed boxes, and suspecting that they would be similarly inspiring to others, Foer began to write letters. The responses he received from luminaries of American writing were nothing short of astounding. Twenty writers generously contributed pieces of prose and poetry that are as eclectic as they are imaginative, and the result is a unique collaborative project and one of the most significant engagements of literature with art for many years.