Top-notch literary profile

The New York Times Magazine has a wonderful profile of young author
Jonathan Safran Foer. (Read it here.) The serious but non-boring literary profile is so rare these days, it's wonderful to see. Sample passage:

Although Foer has been called a poet of missed connections, the paradox is that it is hard to think of another person who makes such large and heroic efforts to stay in touch. During the weeks I was working on this article, he answered the questions that were put to him and reported on his whereabouts on a nearly daily basis; indeed, sometimes on an hourly basis. A kind of epistolary climax was reached one Sunday earlier this month, when I received a total of 19 e-mail messages from him, all of them uncommonly thoughtful and well written.

At times, he would e-mail to express his regret that he could not e-mail. ''I have lots of time to think here,'' he wrote one morning from San Francisco, ''but not too much to write.'' On a subsequent trip to Italy, where he had gone to deliver a lecture -- it was titled ''Imagination Is the Instrument of Compassion,'' after a line from the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert -- his time was even briefer: ''This will be far too short,'' his message opened, ''as I am writing from a public computer in the hotel in Venice. And I am suffering motion sickness. And the inability to use contractions, as I cannot find the apostrophe. . . . ''

I really liked Foer's first novel, Everything is Illuminated. Unfortunately, some of the critics went hog-wild with overpraise, basically calling it the best first novel in the history of mankind, etc., etc., etc. I will say that it was very, very good, but not perfect. I can think of several recent novels I found superior. (Most notably Life of Pi by Yann Martel.) But Everything is Illuminated is still, as I said, very good and well worth a serious reader's time.
Interestingly, Foer's new novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, is about a child's grief after his father dies in the World Trade Center. One of the elements of the story (as reported in the profile above) is that the child's grandfather survived World War II in Dresden. That brought my memory 'round to my recent post here about Kurt Vonnegut. Only a few days after I made that post, it was announced that it was the 60th anniversary of the Dresden bombing, which I hadn't known. Interesting, isn't it, how everything connects like that?