If you’ve been paying close attention to the career of author Jonathan Safran Foer, you might have already heard, several years ago, about his upcoming third novel. Except back then it was called Escape from Children’s Hospital, and was a different book entirely. That novel, which is centered around a fictionalized account of Foer’s childhood friend being horribly burned at summer camp, was recently pushed back indefinitely.

In its stead, Foer has announced a new novel, Here I Am, to be released with a new publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The first of a three-book deal (two fiction and one nonfiction), Here I Am takes place over a single tumultuous month as family and global dramas collide. Set in present-day Washington, Foer’s story has a collapsing Jewish marriage at the center of it all, as three sons are faced with a family implosion that parallels a devastating earthquake in the Middle East and an invasion of Israel. The title is taken from Abraham’s response to God when he is asked to sacrifice his child in the Book of Genesis.

Eric Chinski, who acquired the book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, had this to say about Here I Am to The New York Times:

You wouldn’t mistake any sentence of it for any other writer. It’s got this high-wire inventiveness and intensity of imagination in it, and the sheer energy that we associate with Jonathan’s writing, but it’s a big step forward for him. It’s got a kind of toughness; it’s dirty, it’s kind of funny, like Portnoy’s Complaint, it exposes American Jewish life.

Foer, who is best known for his first two novels, Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), has since written a 2009 piece of nonfiction about abstaining from meat (Eating Animals) and a 2010 experimental cut-out adaptation of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz (The Tree of Codes)—the latter of which being recently adapted to the stage with the help of Jamie xx.

Here I Am will be on bookshelves in September of 2016.

(via The Guardian)

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Jonathan Safran Foer

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