Who

The extremely cloying and incredibly pretentious lit star is best known as the author of 2002's Everything is Illuminated. He's also the husband of Nicole Krauss.

Backstory

The son of a PR exec and an antitrust researcher, Foer grew up in what turned out to be the most 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 advisor, Joyce Carol Oates. Following post-graduation stints as a receptionist, morgue assistant, ghostwriter, jewelry salesman, farm sitter(?), archivist and math tutor—or so he claims—he burst onto the scene at 25 with 2002's Everything is Illuminated, which he'd been drafting since he was 20. (Agent Nicole Aragi finagled him a $500,000 advance for it.) With rapturous blurbs from Salman Rushdie, Francine Prose, and John Updike, the book—a tragicomic account of one young man's search for the Ukrainian woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis—was a major hit, and spawned a (albeit critically and commercially disastrous) film version. His second novel, 2005's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, narrated by a nine-year-old boy who loses his father on Sept. 11th, was also a commercial success—and has been optioned for the big screen by Scott Rudin.

Of note

Foer's rapid success and pronounced tendency toward preciousness and pretension both in his writing (Extremely Loud ends with a flipbook depicting a body falling from a building) and in interviews (he suggested Alf would have been a better choice than Elijah Wood to play him in the film version of Illuminated), have made him the author literary types love to hate. "Foer isn't just a bad author, he's a vile one," said the New York Press shortly after Foer's debut was published. Adding him to the their list of "Most Loathsome New Yorkers"—which he's been on three times in five years—the paper later fulminated, "Joyce Carol Oates invented this Jewish mother's wet dream in a Princeton laboratory, and now we have to live in a world where eager-to-please frauds like Foer receive unearned comparisons to geniuses like Burgess and Joyce."

Family ties

Other members of the notoriously overachieving Foer clan include older brother Franklin Foer, the recently-installed editor of the New Republic, and younger brother Joshua Foer, a freelance science writer who nabbed a $1.2 million advance for a memoir about being a memory champion, forthcoming from Penguin Press.

Diet

Foer is a fanatic vegetarian. He hosted a PETA-produced video that attacked the kosher meat industry.

Personal

He's married to novelist Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love (which bears some very striking resemblances to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close). They have a son, Sasha, and a Great Dane, George. The family live in a $6.75 million Park Slope brownstone, purchased with the help of Krauss's parents, and Jonathan is often spotted working on his laptop at nearby Ozzie's Café.