Jonathan Safran Foer Books

In the beginning, I ask myself a question that seems deceptively small: why do we eat the way we do? Our choices around food are rarely rational—they’re inherited, whispered from generation to generation, encoded in tradition and in habit. In my own family, food was an expression of love, of belongi...

From Eating Animals

What I uncovered when I began investigating modern meat production was not the pastoral Americana many of us imagine—the red barns, rolling fields, the kindly farmer who raises a few animals with care. Instead, I found a system so vast, secretive, and violent that its reality fundamentally contradic...

From Eating Animals

When I arrived in Ukraine, I carried only a vague hope that someone, somewhere, could point me toward my grandfather’s past. I met Alex Perchov, my translator — a young man determined to be American, with a heart full of vitality and a vocabulary full of comic malapropisms. He came with his grandfat...

From Everything Is Illuminated

As we traveled, I began writing the story of Trachimbrod — not the factual village, but the imagined one, born from fragments and reverence. It was a shtetl founded in the 18th century when a carriage accident birthed a new life and a new myth. I wanted to rebuild what no longer existed, to populate...

From Everything Is Illuminated

Oskar is a child whose world has been shattered but whose imagination refuses to settle into despair. He is precocious, deeply curious, and often overwhelms adults with questions that seem to mix innocence and wisdom. After the loss of his father, Thomas Schell, in the September 11 attacks, silence ...

From Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

With his plan in place, Oskar begins crisscrossing the boroughs of New York City, visiting every person named Black. His search unfolds as a collage of human stories. Each household he enters reveals that loss is not limited to him. From an elderly woman who spends her days cataloging photographs of...

From Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close