In Which Intel Is Not at All Bitter About Jonathan Safran Foer Teaching at YaleReaders,
Some news! Jonathan Safran Foer will teach a semester of classes to Yale English majors in the Writing Concentration, the Yale Daily News reports. It’s a boon for the program, as it’s rare to snag a young writer at the top of his game. The concentration has long boasted acclaimed poet J.D. McClatchy, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Donald Marguiles, and Amy Bloom, the author of the recent New York Times best-selling book Away. The instinct is to make a joke about how Jonathan Safran Foer’s second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, felt like it was written for a freshman creative-writing class. But maybe that’s too harsh. There are probably lots of young Yale students in the Writing Concentration who think that Safran Foer’s insight might just help them become a successful novelist at a young age. Instead of, you know, becoming a bitter blogger, which is what the program did for me.
Love,
Your Constantly Yale-Referencing Daily Intel editor, Chris
Famed Author to Teach Fiction [Yale Daily News]
in other news
Everything Is PesadichWe somehow missed the news Friday that Park Slope’s own Wise Son, Jonathan Safran Foer, has announced he will publish his own version of the Passover Haggadah. Why? Are the 4,000 known versions of the book insufficient? As he explains in the current Forward, it’s because he doesn’t think those versions are good enough.
“We talk about slavery every year,” Foer said. “We talk about the movement toward freedom every year. But when was the last time a Seder made you really feel those things in a deep way — when you said, ‘I want to become more active, say, in stopping what’s going on in Darfur’? Because if that’s not an example of a situation that needs this movement toward freedom, nothing is. Or, ‘I need to work harder to make my life more energy independent,’ because we are slaves to energy right now.”
Next year in a Prius!
Jonathan Safran Foer to Release English Version of Haggadah [Forward]
