NEXT WEDNESDAY!!!! OCT. 25TH @ 6 PM!

BOOK DISCUSSION + PIZZA

Mayfield Regional Library [DIRECTIONS]

Here is a review from amazon.com:

The simplest thing would be to describe Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer's accomplished debut, as a novel about the Holocaust. It is, but that really fails to do justice to the sheer ambition of this book. The main story is a grimly familiar one. A young Jewish American--who just happens to be called Jonathan Safran Foer--travels to the Ukraine in the hope of finding the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. He is aided in his search by Alex Perchov, a naïve Ukrainian translator, Alex's grandfather (also called Alex), and a flatulent mongrel dog named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. On their journey through Eastern Europe's obliterated landscape they unearth facts about the Nazi atrocities and the extent of Ukrainian complicity that have implications for Perchov as well as Safran Foer. This narrative is not, however, recounted from (the character) Jonathan Safran Foer's perspective. It is relayed through a series of letters that Alex sends to Foer. These are written in the kind of broken Russo-English normally reserved for Bond villains or Latka from Taxi. Interspersed between these letters are fragments of a novel by Safran Foer--a wonderfully imagined, almost magical realist, account of life in the shtetl before the Nazis destroyed it. These are in turn commented on by Alex, creating an additional metafictional angle to the tale.

If all this sounds a little daunting, don't be put off; Safran Foer is an extremely funny as well as intelligent writer who combines some of the best Jewish folk yarns since Isaac Bashevis Singer with a quite heartbreaking meditation on love, friendship, and loss.

Here is Foer's official site: http://www.theprojectmuseum.com/

Here's an exploratory site for the novel: http://www.whoisaugustine.com/

Here is a picture of Foer:

Born in Washington, D.C., Foer attended Princeton University, where he studied philosophy and literature and was awarded the Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior Creative Writing Thesis Prizes. In 2000, he was awarded the Zoetrope: All-Story Fiction Prize. At Princeton, he took a class with Joyce Carol Oates, who took an interest in him and helped launch him to broad fame.

He traveled to Ukraine in 1999 to research his grandfather's life. Though he had not originally planned it, this trip resulted in his debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, which was published in 2002 by Houghton Mifflin. The book garnered him a National Jewish Book Award and a Guardian First Book Award.

Everything is Illuminated was adapted to film by the director Liev Schreiber and features Elijah Wood in the lead role and came out on September 16, 2005.

He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, novelist Nicole Krauss, and their son Sasha.

TRAILER FOR THE MOVIE

CLIP 1

CLIP 2

CLIP 3

TOTALLY UNRELATED CLIP ABOUT BEING A VEGETARIAN