Everything Is Illuminated

Name: Everything Is Illuminated
ISBN: 9780544484009

A Novel

Jonathan Safran Foer

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION
WINNER OF THE HAROLD U. RIBALOW PRIZE

With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man—also named Jonathan Safran Foer—sets out 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.

As their adventure unfolds, 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

About the Author

Jonathan Safran Foer is an American novelist and essayist whose fiction explores memory, loss, family, and Jewish identity in the shadow of the twentieth century’s catastrophes.

Born in Washington, D.C., in 1977, Foer studied at Princeton University, where he worked with Joyce Carol Oates and Jeffrey Eugenides. A trip to Ukraine in search of the village where his grandfather had survived the Holocaust became the seed of his debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated (2002). Blending comic invention with the history of a vanished shtetl, the book follows a young American writer named Jonathan and his Ukrainian guide as they excavate a family’s past. It won the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction and the Guardian First Book Award, and it was adapted into a 2005 film directed by Liev Schreiber.

His second novel, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), follows a young New Yorker who lost his father on September 11, 2001, and interweaves that story with his grandparents’ memories of the bombing of Dresden. Experimental in form, it uses photographs, typographic play, and shifting voices to ask how families carry grief across generations. It was adapted for film in 2011.

Foer’s later work extends his engagement with Jewish tradition and family life. He edited The New American Haggadah (2012), a contemporary translation and commentary for the Passover seder, and published Here I Am (2016), a novel about a Jewish American family in Washington, D.C., whose marriage unravels as a crisis in the Middle East unfolds. Ranging between domestic comedy and questions of belonging, obligation, and Israel, it is his most direct treatment of contemporary Jewish life. His nonfiction includes Eating Animals (2009) and We Are the Weather (2019), both on the ethics and environmental stakes of food and climate.

Foer has taught creative writing at New York University, and his work has been translated into more than three dozen languages. He lives in Brooklyn.