Jonathan Safran Foer

Publishing his ambitious first novel about the Holocaust, Everything Is Illuminated (2002), at the precocious age of 25 and to the tune of a $500,000 advance was bound to bring out Jonathan Safran Foer skeptics who felt the emperor-or, given his age at the time, perhaps the emperor-to-be-wore no clothes, but Foer demonstrated he was no one-trick pony when he followed up with a book about the equally difficult topic of 9/11, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). Film adaptations of both novels followed, in 2005 and 2011, and meanwhile Foer penned a best-seller that argued the case for vegetarianism, Eating Animals (2009) followed by an experimental book, Tree of Codes (2010), which Foer created by cutting most of the words out of his favorite novel, Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles (1934).