Rochester Arts & Lectures

Jonathan Safran Foer
Underwritten by Barbara and John Lovenheim
October 2, 2008

Considered by many critics to be the voice of his generation, bestselling novelist Jonathan Safran Foer was the recipient of the 2002 National Jewish Book Award and a Guardian First Book Award, and was included in Granta Magazine’s 2007 list of “Best Young American Novelists.” The narrators of his two books (Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), “both have a sort of rawness,” says Foer. “Their limitations define them. In the case of Alex in Everything Is Illuminated, it’s a linguistic limitation. In the case of Oskar [in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close], it’s limitation of experience. He hasn’t been in the world that much. In both cases, they look at things differently, and they help us do the same, which is one of the virtues of books. They can strip us of all the ways we’re jaded, or numb to things.”

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