...according to a tipster who says this shocking fact was "revealed in an email to the writing class he's teaching at yale." Also: "heard he's very grumpy and said this week's essays had better make life worth living." Anyone else have more details? Is this our fault? Did we give him the shingles with our psychic…
In response to Vanity Fair's earlier item about the play by an old friend of novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, about how novelist Jonathan Safran Foer suddenly got very rich and famous while his old friend did not, Foer says, "his play is hilarious and great. I hope it's bigger than The Lion King." [VF, Earlier]
From lovable Brooklynite novelist Jonathan "Safran" Foer (the hip one!) to New Republic editor Franklin Foer (he's the serious one!) to stunt-rememberer and baby brother Joshua Foer (he will come up with some way to bother us later!), everyone loves the Foer Brothers. Everyone except, apparently, playwright Itamar…
The son of a PR exec and an antitrust researcher, the extremely cloying and incredibly precious lit star grew up in what turned out to be an intellectually fertile split-level in the D.C. suburbs. His early literary efforts at Princeton (he won the creative writing prize four years running) were nurtured by his thesis…
Being a Brooklyn Writer turns out to be exactly how you imagine it to be, if debut novelist Porochista Khakpour's Facebook status update is to be believed.
"Yale Visiting Professor Jonathan Safran Foer" has a nice ring to it! According to one Yale English prof: "He's got quite a buzz surrounding him right now in literary circles." Oh! Hmm. Also! "Although Foer was rejected from Yale as a high school senior and attended Princeton University as an undergraduate, his…
Hey, have you ever noticed that famous bestselling authors like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nathan Englander, Nicole Krauss, and Myla Goldberg all have something in common? That's right: Jewiness. I know, you're shocked. But did you also know that an under-the-radar Jewish organization called the Jewish Book…
Young Joshua Ferris's debut about working at an ad agency at the tail end of the dot-com boom is one of our favorite books we've read in a while, so it pains us to have to acknowledge that he is a pussy. At his book party, he told us in no uncertain terms that Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss "deserve all the…
Oh, those crazy Safran Foer Krausses! We had almost managed to convince ourselves that they didn't matter anymore—after all, they've been too busy pooping out little scribblers to crank out any irritatingly overhyped books lately. But last night we heard this tidbit, from a source close to the writers, that made us…
Yesterday, we asked you to choose your least favorite among the Jonathans, Bens and Davids of the literary world and their lovely writer-spouses. You voted for Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss by a pretty substantial margin, spanking runners-up Davendela and Michayelet. Nicole wins a signed copy of the execrable …
For a long time, we've dreamt of a magazine called UnderCover, which would basically be Us Weekly but for literary "celebrities." The whole thing would be like "Jennifer Egan loses the baby weight!" and telephoto lens shots of Jonathan Franzen Safran Foer (admit it, you can't keep 'em all straight either) and Nicole…
So yeah, Slate scribe and Jonathan Safran Foer sib Joshua sold his memoir about memorizing shit to Anne Godoff for a cool 1.2 million, like we said.
Today we learn that film rights to the book, now tentatively titled Moonwalking with Einstein, have sold to Paramount.
The book sold on the basis of a proposal, which…
A tipster informs us that the author of summertime sleeper hit Water For Elephants has sold her next two books, the first of which, The Ape House, is about "monkeys who live together in a house," to Cindy Spiegel at Spiegel and Grau, for the highly improbable-seeming (but hey, whatever) sum of 5.2 million, making…
Recipe for September 16 Brooklyn Book Fest:
Instead, we'll go with the more lighthearted behind-the-scenes reel, in which Foer talks about how being a vegetarian is "as easy as easy could be." Wish we could say the same for watching the video, which requires you to look directly at the overly precious JSF for an uncomfortable length of time.
Too often, we find that an article doesn't live up to its promise. As journalists are wont to do, they reel us in with a fantastic lede, our panties get in a pleasant twist, and then — nothing. The article peaks with its first sentence, leaving us with little more than a crippling case of desire.
• Will Ferrell did not die in a paragliding accident. And if he did, do you really think you'd hear about it through a barely literate press release? [Defamer]
• So long as MTV-ready bands behave like this in Manhattan hotels, we'd rather sleep in our shoebox. Fucking trash monkeys, all of them. [Hotel Chatter]
•…
We nearly forgot: Today's Washington Post brings news that the USA Memory Championship took place here in New York yesterday, and it was won by a 23-year-old Yale graduate named Joshua Foer. He's also, as the more wonkily inclined among you might chose to label him, the 23-year-younger brother of new New Republic…
It's day two of asap, the AP's new "younger audience service," and we think we now understand it: Younger audiences like brief, totally inconsequential and news-free items on ridiculously overexposed "young" "celebrities."
• Paris Hilton sleeps a little more soundly at night knowing that a teen has been sentenced for the hacking of her Sidekick. And so the infotainment industry exhales and Senator Durbin gets his much-needed closure. [eWEEK]
• Beyoncé pulls a David Pogue on Jay-Z. [Cityrag]
• NYC ranks as the most expensive rental…
