Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Name: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
ISBN: 9780618711659

A Novel

Jonathan Safran Foer

A funny, uplifting coming-of-age story about a boy’s journey through New York in the aftermath of September 11th from one of today’s most celebrated writers.

Nine-year-old Oskar Schell embarks on an urgent, secret mission that will take him through the five boroughs of New York. His goal is to find the lock that matches a mysterious key that belonged to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11. This seemingly impossible task will bring Oskar into contact with survivors of all sorts of an exhilarating, affecting, often hilarious, and ultimately healing journey. With humor, tenderness, and awe, Jonathan Safran Foer confronts the traumas of our country’s difficult history.

“Energetic, inventive, and ambitious…an uplifting myth born of the sorrows of 9/11.” —Boston Sunday Globe

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a miracle, a daybreak, a man on the moon. It’s so impeccably imagined, so courageously executed, so everlastingly moving and fine.” —Baltimore Sun

“A funny, wise, deeply compassionate novel that will renew readers’ faith that the right book at the right time still has the power to change the world.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

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.