Jonathan Safran Foer has achieved considerable acclaim with his recent bestselling works of fiction: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a riveting, humanizing novel that recreates the anguish and affirmation of the September 11 attacks. In this lecture, of lighter fare, Foer discusses the literary world of children's books and cookbooks.

Foer's first novel, Everything is Illuminated, won the Los Angeles Times’ 2002 Book of the Year and the National Jewish Book Award, as well as the Guardian First Book Award, and the York Public Library Young Lions Prize. Foer—whose shorter pieces often appear inThe New Yorker, The New York Times, Conjunctions, and the Paris Review—also has contributed to and edited A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, a book he conceived while still enrolled at Princeton. In addition to earning his undergraduate degrees in philosophy and literature, over the course of his collegiate career, Foer amassed accolades, winning the annual creative writing competition all four of his years. His early success has followed him into his professional career; Foer’s recent honors include the Zeotrope All-Story Fiction Prize and a Bronfman Fellowship.

While at the Academy, he is working on a new English version of the Haggadah, the Jewish text that contains the order of the Passover holiday Seder and performs a “telling” of the Israelites’ liberation from slavery in Egypt. Helge Malchow, Foer's German publisher, was born in 1950, studied Literature, Social Sciences and Philosophy in Cologne. After a short career as a high school teacher, he joined Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1983 as an editor. In 1990 he became the publishing house’s editor-in-chief, and publishing CEO in 2002. He has published, among many others, the works of Wolf Biermann, Uwe Timm, Nick Hornby, Dave Eggers, and Jonathan Safran Foer.