Jonathan Safran Foer
Photo by Emily Berl

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER: “YOU HAVE TO WASTE A LOT TO HAVE A LITTLE”

by UWE-JENS SCHUMANN

SHORT PROFILE

Name: Jonathan Safran Foer
DOB: 21 February 1977
Place of birth: Washington, DC, United States
Occupation: Author

Mr. Foer, is it true that you used to ask your favorite authors to send you one empty page from their new manuscripts?

That was more than 10 years ago, I haven’t done it for quite a long time. I still have those pages, though, on my wall in my house but I just haven’t actually asked for a new one for quite a long time. I don’t think I’ve done it since I became a writer myself. Actually, it’s interesting because since I did that collection, a lot of those authors that sent me pages have died. Susan Sontag, Arthur Miller, David Foster Wallace… Quite a few have passed away.

My writing day / Jonathan Safran Foer / ‘I don’t have writer’s block, but am a chronic sufferer of “Jonathan block”’

Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer: ‘I don’t have writer’s block, but am a chronic sufferer of “Jonathan block”’

This article is more than 7 years old

The author on canal boats, libraries and why he writes with a blanket on his lap

Jonathan Safran Foer

Saturday 29 August 2016

To mark the imminent end of summer, my boys and I recently went on a journey down the Erie Canal. Before being handed the key to our 12-ton narrowboat, the Oneida, we were given a shockingly brief and casual orientation. Much that was assumed obvious – “Obviously you tie your line around the cord in the lock, but don’t tie up, otherwise you’ll capsize” – was not only unobvious to us, but incomprehensible. When explaining the process of docking, the marina worker asked if we “knew knots”. Speaking on behalf of my kids, one of whom has Velcro shoes, while the other walks around with two snakes of laces trailing each foot, I told him we didn’t. He said, “Well, you know the saying.” I told him we didn’t even know that. He said, “If you don’t know knots, tie lots.”

Jonathan Safran Foer: ‘There isn't a person on Earth who doesn’t smoke pot’

Interview

THIS MUCH I KNOW

Jonathan Safran Foer: ‘There isn't a person on Earth who doesn’t smoke pot’

This article is more than 6 years old

The bestselling author, 40, on avoiding Twitter, the anxieties of parenthood and the memory of a childhood accident that’s shaped his life

Andrew Hankinson

 13 May 2017 14.00 BST

As a child I was encouraged to participate in adult conversations, encouraged to go out into the world and assume a role that runs the risk of making a kid very annoying. Because my brothers are also writers, there’s an assumption it was a kind of intellectual home. I don’t know that it was. Did we have more books than my friends? Probably not. Did we talk about literature? No.

Here I Am by Johathan Safran Foer / Review

Jonathan Safran Foer

NOVEMBER 10, 2016 

BY ROSEMARY GORING

11 November, 2016

Following the election as US president of Donald J. Trump readers dumbfounded by the result may be interested in this interview with leading American novelist, Jonathan Safran Foer, which was conducted in August by Rosemary Goring during this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival. It was first published in the Herald.

Jonathan Safran Foer in Brooklyn. Photograph: BEBETO MATTHEWS

Once upon a life: Jonathan Safran Foer

When he was just nine years old an explosion in the science lab at summer camp seriously injured him and almost killed his best friend. Jonathan Safran Foer returns to that terrible day in 1985 to examine the scars the blast left – and explain why the wounds are more than skin deep

The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday March 7 2010

Jonathan Safran Foer
Sunday 28 February 2010

This article incorrectly reported a Nasa statement on the space shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. Nasa eventually released transcripts of the voice recordings and there was no mention of an astronaut saying: "Please, hold my hand."

 

How September 11 changed the fiction landscape in 13 novels

Ron Charles

September 10, 2021

The demonic choreography of al-Qaeda’s attack on the United States instantly rendered September 11, 2001 the most documented act of terrorism in human history. As the North Tower of the World Trade Centre burned, cameras already on the scene filmed the second plane soaring into the South Tower. Those appalling images, infinitely reproduced, colonised the minds and imaginations of a generation.

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer / Review

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

Meat production is indeed an ugly business but sentimental arguments will never persuade Jay Rayner to turn vegan


Jay Rayner
Sunday 28 February 2010 00.05 GMT

M

any millennia ago, our early ancestors finally clambered to their feet and set off in pursuit of prey. It was the increased volume of animal protein in the hominid diet brought about by that change in behaviour that fuelled the development of the brain and its growth in intellectual capacity; a process that lead inexorably to the birth, in 1977, of Jonathan Safran Foer, a smart Jewish boy from the American east coast who has now written a book about what's wrong with the modern way in which most of the animals we eat are produced. Which is to say, everything: the genetic manipulation of the breeding stock to produce maximum feed-to-meat conversion, regardless of the suffering it causes; the appalling circumstances in which these creatures are then raised, crammed together, the stench of their own shit in their nostrils; the barbarity of the slaughter process, which can result in cattle literally being flayed alive.

Prior to this book Safran Foer was best known for quirky, self-consciously experimental novels: Everything Is Illuminated, which investigated our responses to the Holocaust that had impacted so directly upon his own family, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, set against the backdrop of 9/11. Both books played with form, and introduced typographic and diagrammatic elements, a few of which also feature here.

This, however, is a different beast, a detailed piece of journalism, the product, as he tells us repeatedly, of three years of intense research. The problem is that while the subject may be new to him, there is actually nothing new of any substance here for an informed readership. Accounts of the appalling degradations committed by the worst of the factory farming system in the United States are legion. There have been myriad newspaper and magazine articles, plus academic reports and mass-market books, including those by Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, as the extensive if badly organised notes section at the back attests.

Still, Safran Foer projects energetically the wide-eyed shock and disgust of the innocent, newly defiled. This is both a vice and a virtue. The author explains that he began his investigation as first-time fatherhood beckoned. He wanted to know what it was he would be feeding his child. This varnishes the book with a certain preciousness; Lord save us from the self-importance of the first-time parent, up to his nipples in the sacred duties of nurture.

And yet, for all that this comes to feel like a device, it does lend a keen urgency to his writing. Safran Foer is at his best when he is presenting the facts of the matter: not just the gruesome manner in which poultry, pigs and cattle are raised in what has become the most grotesquely efficient food production system the world has ever seen, creating animal protein that is cheaper than at any time in human history, but also in his detailed account of the ways in which a billion-dollar industry has influenced animal welfare legislation in the US. Here he marshals his material with skill and precision. Anybody who eats meat, and wants to continue doing so, should read this book for these sections alone.

The problems arise when he tries to advance a blanket argument as to why the process he describes should lead us to cease eating meat altogether, even though he claims the book is not an argument for vegetarianism. Ever the philosophy major, he starts from first principles, which is to say the regard in which we hold animals. The issue here, of course, is one of what some would call sentiment and others would call realism. Either you fully identify with animals as equals, who are therefore deserving of our complete protection, or you regard them as lesser and subservient, in which case – accepting their right to be spared cruelty – it's OK to eat them.

It will come as no shock to most readers that I fall into the latter camp, and there is nothing in this text to shift me over to the other side of the argument. He lurches from unsupported statement to unsupported statement, refusing to accept, for example, that certain animal behaviour is just instinct and therefore ascribing to it a higher intelligence. Curiously, he also thinks that the opinions of Frank Kafka lend weight to his thesis; personally, I find the fact that Kafka used to talk to fish at the Berlin Aquarium because he felt that, having abandoned eating them, he was now allowed to do so, is proof only that the author ofMetamorphosis was a little odd.

But the book's main weakness is that Safran Foer isn't just appalled by factory farming. He is appalled by animal husbandry, full stop. Even the most high-end livestock farm, sodden with ethical values and systems, dismays him. My sympathy with his shock is somewhat limited. The reality is that the raising of animals for food is an ugly business, however unintensive the methods used. That's a truth we must confront. There is no doubt that we have become too divorced from our food production system. We need to know how it works. We need to know what eating meat means.

What it doesn't mean is that all factory farming is necessarily bad. I do not expect to convert a single vegetarian or vegan to my viewpoint when I say that there is a human imperative to eat animal protein, despite the fact that the whole of our history bears this out. We should certainly eat less of it, and we should be as humane as possible in weighing up the balance between nutritional need and animal suffering. We need to consider the environmental impacts but we also need to think, in a way Safran Foer never does, about the impact of cheaply available animal proteins upon the mass population, rather than just the affluent middle-class portion of it.

Hugh Pennington, emeritus professor of bacteriology at Aberdeen University and an expert on the food chain, has long argued that the downsides for human health of cheaply farmed animal proteins – campylobacter in chicken, for example, which can be dealt with by proper cooking – have been far outweighed by the upsides. Before those cheap proteins became available, people died from TB as a result of being malnourished. And in those arguments I always side, unapologetically, with the humans.

Which is not to condone the worst excesses of factory farming. I do not, but polarised arguments are not the answer. Eating Animals begins with a short statement by the author explaining that, while it was written about the US market, "a British reader who cares about the issues ... should not find any peace in being British". Peace, no, but a certain reassurance that we are heading in the right direction much faster.

The appalling stall and tether pig-rearing system that Safran Foer describes in such detail, for example, has been banned here since 1997 and will be banned across Europe by 2013. Likewise, free-range eggs now account for 40% of the market, a recent increase fuelled by the decision of McDonald's in the UK to use only the free-range variety. The idea of a major commercial concern being a vehicle for such welcome change can disconcert those who appear to think the issues around industrial food production are a matter of black and white. They aren't, however eloquently Jonathan Safran Foer, who, thanks to animal proteins, stands at the apex of human evolution, tries to argue otherwise.

THE GUARDIAN

Jonathan Safran Foer to publish first novel in a decade

Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer 

to publish first novel in a decade

Here I Am is the story of an American Jewish family, set against a background of traumatic events in the Middle East


Alison Flood
Monday 21 December 2015 12.27 GMT

Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel in 11 years, set against a backdrop where Israel is invaded and the Middle East has been hit by an earthquake, will be published next autumn.

Called Here I Am, the novel will take place in Washington, where a Jewish family with three sons faces the fallout as the parents’ marriage struggles. According to the New York Times, which reported its acquisition by US press Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the title is drawn from the book of Genesis, in which Abraham is tested by God and asked to sacrifice his son Isaac:

After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.’

The novel sees relatives from Israel visiting the troubled family in Washington for the bar mitzvah of one of the sons, while in the wider world, the Middle East has been devastated by an earthquake and Israel is being invaded.

“You wouldn’t mistake any sentence of it for any other writer,” acquiring editor Eric Chinski told the New York Times. “It’s got this high-wire inventiveness and intensity of imagination in it, and the sheer energy that we associate with Jonathan’s writing, but it’s a big step forward for him. It’s got a kind of toughness; it’s dirty, it’s kind of funny, like Portnoy’s Complaint, it exposes American Jewish life.”

Here I Am will be published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton next September. A previous novel by Foer that had been acquired by the Penguin imprint three years ago, Escape From Children’s Hospital, has now been “moved off the schedule”, said Hamish Hamilton. That novel was a “fictionalised account of when an explosion in a summer camp science class left Safran Foer’s best friend without skin on his face or hands, leaving the author unscathed by inches”, according to the Bookseller.

Foer’s previous novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, was published in 2005, telling the story of a nine-year-old boy on a quest to unravel the mystery of a key belonging to his father, who died in the World Trade Centre attacks on 11 September. His debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, won the Guardian first book award. In 2010, he published Tree of Codes, which created a new story using the words of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles.

THE GUARDIAN

Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer / Review

Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer – review

Michel Faber considers Jonathan Safran Foer's cut-up of Bruno Schulz

Michel Faber

Saturday 18 December 2018

J

onathan Safran Foer's all-time favourite book is Bruno Schulz'sCinnamon Shops, retitled The Street Of Crocodiles when it was translated into English 47 years ago. "Some things you love passively,"Foer told Vanity Fair, "some you love actively. In this case, I felt the compulsion to do something with it." How might this active love manifest itself? A foreword to a new edition of Schulz's masterwork? No, Foer had already done that, for the Penguin Classics reissue published in 2008 in the US (but sadly not here). So, might Foer do something to bring Schulz's book back into print in the UK? Or might he commission a fresh translation? (Celina Wieniewska's 1963 version still reads like a dream to me, but there have been mutterings about its faithfulness for decades.) Might he script or bankroll a movie adaptation?

Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles

Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles

Posted on March 18, 2013

by jyourist

Self-Portrait, Bruno Schulz

I came to this book through Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, which is an excised novel of Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles. Foer explains at the end of his book that he had always wanted to create an excised book but couldn’t decide which book to use– a dictionary, an encyclopedia, a phone book. But all these choices seemed to be more about the process and less connected to content and meaning. It was then he thought of excising his favorite book, his favorite author, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. Born in 1892 in Drohobycz, Poland, Schulz was a quiet, unassuming man who taught art in the local high school. He was a loner. In his free time, he wrote and made drawings.

 

Nicole Krauss

Power authors Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss split

IAN MOHR

June 17, 2014 

Literary power couple Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss have legally separated.

Foer, author of “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” and Krauss, whose most recent novel was “Great House,” married in 2004 and drove aspiring Brooklyn writers to fits of jealously when they put their Park Slope home up for sale for $14.5 million last October.

But a rep confirmed that they “split amicably about a year ago.” Foer then bought a Boerum Hill brownstone eight months ago.

Krauss initially stayed in the six-bedroom, 7,670-square-foot townhouse, but has moved out and is living near her ex.

“[They] have chosen to live in close proximity in order to raise their children,” the rep added.

The Park Slope home didn’t sell but is being re-listed with a different broker.

The breakup was so quiet, the pair, once dubbed “the too-successful-to-stomach physical embodiment of literary Brooklyn” by New York magazine, was included in April on a Huffington Post list of “kickass literary power couples” with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Vladimir and Véra Nabokov.

PAGE SIX

Lydia Davis / What I´m reading

"In London this past summer I had dinner

with a convivial table of new acquaintances, 

of whom two had already been moved

by Foer`s book to change their eating habits.."

LYDIA DAVIS

What I´m reading

UNTITLED BOOKS

ISSUE 50 / DECEMBER 2012

Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and several collections of short fiction. She is also the translator of numerous works from the French, most recently Flaubert's Madame Bovary for Penguin Classics. She was named Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government and is also the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship. Here, she shares what she's recently been reading...

Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison

A novel in the unusual form of 600 or so numbered and (some of them) titled small sections that combine in a disjunctive but roughly linear way to create an engaging narrative involving family and friends, boyfriends and (several) "exes," some of them dysfunctional, some merely eccentric and strong-minded. Robison writes in a vibrant style with the economy and emotional force of another Grace Paley, but with a harder edge. And she's quite funny.

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

I thought I would encounter a lot of familiar material in Foer's book, since I have read some others on the same topic, but with every page I read, my eyes are opened further to the full catastrophe of present-day food production methods, not just in the USA but globally. (And Foer has been scrupulous in his research, hiring two fact-checkers to verify all his findings.) In London this past summer I had dinner with a convivial table of new acquaintances, of whom two had already been moved by Foer's book to change their eating habits; now I, too, am making further changes to a mostly vegetarian diet: no more diner omelettes! No more fish dinners! It is hard not to be affected, if only (a big hurdle) one can face the unpalatable facts. (And as Foer points out, as long as we continue to give our tacit consent to them, the abominable practices will remain in place.)

Instead of a Letter by Diana Athill

I have just begun this one, and already I'm relishing Athill's graceful, well-balanced prose and warm, inclusive intelligence. I have read two of her later memoirs, Stet andYesterday Morning, and I expect to derive the same pleasure from spending time in her company again, in the course of this book, and experiencing those years of the last century as she so richly describes them. (Then I plan to continue with After the Funeraland Somewhere Towards the End.)

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http://untitledbooks.com/features/reading/lydia-davis/

Read also

Biography of Lydia Davis