Mailing List


Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Articles Available Online


There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

Much has been written about the precocity and talent of Jonathan Safran Foer, whose debut novel Everything is Illuminated (2002) commanded a $500,000 advance and was released when its author was barely 25 Originating in a creative writing thesis written under the guidance of Joyce Carol Oates when he was an undergraduate at Princeton, it tells the story of one Jonathan Safran Foer, a young American Jew in search of the Ukrainian woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis   Hailed by The Times as a ‘work of genius’ after which ‘things will never be the same’, it won the Guardian First Book award and was – unfortunately, disastrously – made into a film starring Elijah Wood in 2005 The praise wasn’t universal, with the book also facing charges of preciousness and factual inaccuracy   His second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), is narrated by a 9-year-old boy who has lost his father in the 9/11 attacks Ending in a flipbook showing a figure falling from the Twin Towers – or ascending, depending how one decides to flip the pages – it also divided opinion Salman Rushdie called it ‘ambitious, pyrotechnic, riddling, and above all … extremely moving’; influential New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani described it as ‘cloying’ ‘While it contains moments of shattering emotion and stunning virtuosity that attest to Mr Foer’s myriad gifts as a writer,’ she added, ‘the novel as a whole feels simultaneously contrived and improvisatory, schematic and haphazard’ Meanwhile, the film adaptation, released earlier this year, was ‘almost universally reviled’, according to the Guardian’s Xan Brooks, but made the author himself cry   This is the way it has been for Safran Foer ever since his extremely successful and unnervingly mature debut: he is the only contemporary writer, with perhaps the current exception of Jonathan Franzen, to command such extreme reactions from the reading public Foer-bashing, imaginatively and appropriately dubbed ‘Schadenfoer’ by the Guardian, threatened to spiral out of control in 2008 when the likes of Gawker took it out on the author’s lifestyle Married to fellow author Nicole Krauss, Safran Foer is a practicing vegetarian

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

READ NEXT

fiction

March 2015

Wedding Watcher

Helle Helle

TR. Martin Aitken

fiction

March 2015

I strayed into the church on an impulse. It was a mistake to get off the bus in the...

fiction

Issue No. 20

Track

Nicole Flattery

fiction

Issue No. 20

My boyfriend, the comedian, took pleasure in telling me about rejection – how it came about, how to cope...

Interview

December 2016

Interview with Caragh Thuring

Harry Thorne

Interview

December 2016

When I first visited Caragh Thuring in her east London studio, there was an old man lurking in the...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required