Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 bestseller grapples with some of life’s toughest lessons: grief, loss, death, and isolation. Overarching all of them like a burial shroud is something even more crippling: the inability to express one’s thoughts and feelings to another. Using the world-changing events of 9/11 as a springboard, Foer dives into these murky subjects, treating them with his characteristic literary verve and inventiveness. We see the post-9/11 world through the eyes of Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old with an exceptionally inquisitive mind who has lost his father in the attack on the World Trade Center. How does a nine-year-old cope with grief? Oskar withdraws from the world (he calls the act “zipping into the sleeping bag of myself”), stores his feelings in the dark, loses himself in his extraordinary imagination, and upon finding a mysterious key in his deceased father’s closet, runs from borough to borough looking for clues that he hopes may lead him back to his fath...