Here I Am

Description

Exuberantly funny and deeply moving, a monumental American novel about family, identity and modern life Jacob and Julia Bloch have a problem. While they've been coaxing Jacob's grandfather into a retirement home, bracing themselves for a family reunion, and struggling to keep their eldest son from being expelled, a discovery is made that risks destroying their marriage. And as domestic crises multiply in the foreground, a global disaster is looming on the horizon... Confronting the enduring question of what it means to be human with inventiveness, irreverence and compassion, Here I Am is a great American novel for our times, a masterpiece about how we live now.

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Eating Animals and Here I Am. He has also edited a new modern edition of the sacred Jewish Haggadah. Everything Is Illuminated won several literary prizes, including the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award. He edited the anthology A Convergence of Birds- Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, and his stories have been published in the Paris Review, Conjunctions and the New Yorker. Jonathan Safran Foer teaches Creative Writing at New York University.

Publisher's description. The New York Times bestselling new novel from the author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Wildly exhilarating and profoundly moving, this is the story of a man in crisis, a family imploding, a planet on the brink of disaster. Here I Am is a great American novel for our times, a masterpiece about how we live now. * Penguin * Towering and glorious: a tale of social, familial and marital breakdown . . . and the End of the World. The funniest literary novel I have ever read * The Times * An ambitious platter of intellection and emotion. Its observations are crisp; its intimations of doom resonate; its jokes are funny. Foer's best and most caustic novel, filled with so much pain and regret that your heart sometimes struggles to hold it all. Has more teeming life in it than several hundred well-meaning and well-reviewed books of midlist fiction put together * New York Times * Foer writes like a dream. . . big-hearted, courageous and jaw-droppingly clever -- Deborah Moggach A darkly hilarious mile-a-minute novel * Guardian * Foer has stretched and expanded the possibilities of the novel without losing either intellectual integrity or emotional honesty. Here I Am is not just bold, it is brave... It will be remembered when all the dinner party novels are long forgotten * Scotsman * Highly enjoyable and extremely funny... Foer is an absolute master of his fictional universe * Times Literary Supplement * Emotional depth and dramatic maturity... Unarguably Foer's most substantial and impressive work yet * Herald * Lays bare the interior of a marriage with such intelligence and deep feeling and pitiless clarity, it's impossible to read it and not re-examine your own family. * TIME * A brilliantly acrobatic imagination * Sunday Times * Provocative . . . very, very funny. Dialogue pings, as animated and inventive as an Aaron Sorkin script. * Sunday Times * Terrific, truthful, extremely funny and heartbreaking. * New Statesman * A rich, beautifully written, ambitious and grandly moving novel, which looks both at the world at large and at the deepest concerns of individual lives. * Evening Standard * Astonishing. So sad and so funny and so wry. The book that The Corrections ought to have been * Scotland on Sunday * Brilliant, masterly, always original * New York Times Book Review *