From lovable Brooklynite novelist Jonathan "Safran" Foer (the hip one!) to New Republic editor Franklin Foer (he's the serious one!) to stunt-rememberer and baby brother Joshua Foer (he will come up with some way to bother us later!), everyone loves the Foer Brothers. Everyone except, apparently, playwright Itamar Moses, who has written a play about how much he hates his successful old band camp buddy Jonathan Safran Foer. Vanity Fair noticed that the two main characters in Moses's The Four of Us are quite a bit like Moses and Foer, as one is a mostly unknown playwright and the other is a ridiculously successful young novelist. There is some jealousy. Then Moses makes fun of Liev Schreiber!

The son of a PR exec and an antitrust researcher, the extremely cloying and incredibly precious lit star grew up in what turned out to be an intellectually fertile split-level in the D.C. suburbs. His early literary efforts at Princeton (he won the creative writing prize four years running) were nurtured by his thesis advisor, Joyce Carol Oates. Following post-graduation stints as a receptionist, morgue assistant, ghostwriter, jewelry salesman, farm sitter(?), archivist and math tutor—or so he claims—he burst onto the scene at 25 with 2002's Everything is Illuminated, which he'd been drafting since he was 20. (Agent Nicole Aragi finagled him a $500,000 advance for it.) The book garnered rapturous blurbs from Salman Rushdie, Francine Prose, and John Updike. His second novel, 2005's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, narrated by a nine-year-old autistic boy who loses his father on Sept. 11th, was also a commercial success—and was released as a movie starring none other than Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock around the holidays, 2011.

Being a Brooklyn Writer turns out to be exactly how you imagine it to be, if debut novelist Porochista Khakpour's Facebook status update is to be believed.

"Yale Visiting Professor Jonathan Safran Foer" has a nice ring to it! According to one Yale English prof: "He's got quite a buzz surrounding him right now in literary circles." Oh! Hmm. Also! "Although Foer was rejected from Yale as a high school senior and attended Princeton University as an undergraduate, his brother Joshua Foer '04 said he thinks Jonathan and Yale will be a better match this time around." [Yale Daily News]

Hey, have you ever noticed that famous bestselling authors like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nathan Englander, Nicole Krauss, and Myla Goldberg all have something in common? That's right: Jewiness. I know, you're shocked. But did you also know that an under-the-radar Jewish organization called the Jewish Book Council may be somewhat responsible for these young heebs' rises to fame and fortune? In a column that will run in this Sunday's book review headlined 'Star Search' (heh!), Rachel Donadio explains the inner workings of the Jewish Book Network, which holds American Idol-style cattle call auditions, described as "somewhere between J-Date and a camel auction," for Jewish authors. The winners then get to tour Jewish book fairs around the country, which doesn't sound like such a prize until you learn, as we just did from a publicist, that authors can sell "up to 300 books" at each of these events, which is nothing to sneeze at. The Jew tour does have its perils, though, as one author learned: "Do not follow the woman who has just published a book on how all her children were murdered in Treblinka. It's much preferable to follow the woman who has 100 halvah recipes." Oh, those nutty Jews and their culturally-specific brand of humor!

Young Joshua Ferris's debut about working at an ad agency at the tail end of the dot-com boom is one of our favorite books we've read in a while, so it pains us to have to acknowledge that he is a pussy. At his book party, he told us in no uncertain terms that Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss "deserve all the shit you guys heap on them." Ok, it was a festive occasion and perhaps the celebratory cocktails had loosened Ferris's lips, but! Here's his current take on whether or not The Most Important, Rich, and Precocious Literary Couple Of Our Time deserve to be mocked: "Whatever shit they may or may not have deserved is far less than the shit I deserve for having said publicly that they deserved any shit whatsoever. I spoke unnecessarily of a very minor matter about which I knew very little, and so despite the likelihood that my comments didn't even reach them, I'm glad you asked, so that I can set the record straight: I'm the shitheel." I'll say!

Oh, those crazy Safran Foer Krausses! We had almost managed to convince ourselves that they didn't matter anymore—after all, they've been too busy pooping out little scribblers to crank out any irritatingly overhyped books lately. But last night we heard this tidbit, from a source close to the writers, that made us feel the inadequacy of our lives and real estate holdings as sharply as we did when we first read of their acquisition of a $6.7 million Park Slope brownstone. Apparently, Nicole was recently asked why she and Jon found it necessary to move from their old house, a $3 millionish brownstone a block away. "Well," she said, "You know, we're planning to have at least two kids, and obviously we all need our own floor."

Yesterday, we asked you to choose your least favorite among the Jonathans, Bens and Davids of the literary world and their lovely writer-spouses. You voted for Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss by a pretty substantial margin, spanking runners-up Davendela and Michayelet. Nicole wins a signed copy of the execrable Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Jonathan will receive a signed copy of the 'we hear it's not bad but we have a deep-seated antipathy towards anything contemporary with 'Love' in the title which always strikes us as a marketing gimmick' The History of Love. The couple will also receive a free lifetime subscription to nonexistent UnderCover magazine as well as the privilege of being henceforth referred to as Jonicole. Unfortunately, we didn't include every lit-scene power pair in our poll; a commenter wrote in Salman and Padma (how could we forget her contribution to the canon, Tangy Tart Hot and Sweet?). But the omission we feel worst about has got to be this one:

For a long time, we've dreamt of a magazine called UnderCover, which would basically be Us Weekly but for literary "celebrities." The whole thing would be like "Jennifer Egan loses the baby weight!" and telephoto lens shots of Jonathan Franzen Safran Foer (admit it, you can't keep 'em all straight either) and Nicole Krauss's Park Slope manse. Sadly, the market could never sustain such a thing, but we figure the least we can do in order to keep the dream alive is to do a poll inspired by your response to our item about Heidi Julavitz yesterday. In it, we called Heidi and her dh, Ben Marcus, our "fourth least favorite literary power couple," and it got us to wondering: who's your fourth least favorite literary power couple? And while we're at it, who's your most least favorite l. p. c.? There is only one way to find out.

So yeah, Slate scribe and Jonathan Safran Foer sib Joshua sold his memoir about memorizing shit to Anne Godoff for a cool 1.2 million, like we said.
Today we learn that film rights to the book, now tentatively titled Moonwalking with Einstein, have sold to Paramount.

The book sold on the basis of a proposal, which we hear was rather scanty and unimpressive. But maybe Joshua's a really kickass writer whose work is worth a ton of money. Let's dip into our own archives and see if we can come up with any evidence either way . . . ah, here we go. Joshua Foer, on Conor Oberst:

A tipster informs us that the author of summertime sleeper hit Water For Elephants has sold her next two books, the first of which, The Ape House, is about "monkeys who live together in a house," to Cindy Spiegel at Spiegel and Grau, for the highly improbable-seeming (but hey, whatever) sum of 5.2 million, making Joshua Foer's 1.2 million deal (a memoir which sold to Ann Godoff yesterday, and yes he's JSF's little bro) look like a bargain. Bookscan has Elephants at a totally respectable but not mindblowing 132,503 — Bookscan, of course, is always sorta wrong — and foreign rights to it sold all over the place. Still, 5.2 million for a follow-up to a book which — well, we'll let this book blogger sum it up: "the plot is non-existent, the characters are superficial, there is too much talk of penises and it is just a completely non-memorable basic quick read." So what we want to know is: really? And, if so, was it because of penises? Tell us.

Recipe for September 16 Brooklyn Book Fest:

Instead, we'll go with the more lighthearted behind-the-scenes reel, in which Foer talks about how being a vegetarian is "as easy as easy could be." Wish we could say the same for watching the video, which requires you to look directly at the overly precious JSF for an uncomfortable length of time.

Too often, we find that an article doesn't live up to its promise. As journalists are wont to do, they reel us in with a fantastic lede, our panties get in a pleasant twist, and then — nothing. The article peaks with its first sentence, leaving us with little more than a crippling case of desire.

• Will Ferrell did not die in a paragliding accident. And if he did, do you really think you'd hear about it through a barely literate press release? [Defamer]
• So long as MTV-ready bands behave like this in Manhattan hotels, we'd rather sleep in our shoebox. Fucking trash monkeys, all of them. [Hotel Chatter]
• Ladies, prepare yourselves: Tomorrow is Steak and Blowjob day! Share it with the man you love, or at least one you don't mind sucking off. [SteakandBJDay]
• We can hardly fathom paying $82 for a stack of magazines. Make them a stack of bridal magazines, and you've the third ring of hell. [Bridal Blog]
• A Gay Clay is a defective one. [Got Detroit?]
• The bad thing about winning the U.S. Memory Championship is being unable to forget the reporter bugging you, that damn Foer kid. [Slate]

We nearly forgot: Today's Washington Post brings news that the USA Memory Championship took place here in New York yesterday, and it was won by a 23-year-old Yale graduate named Joshua Foer. He's also, as the more wonkily inclined among you might chose to label him, the 23-year-younger brother of new New Republic editor Franklin Foer. Or, for all you Park Slopians, the 23-year-old younger brother of hipster-chic novelist Jonathan Safran Foer.

It's day two of asap, the AP's new "younger audience service," and we think we now understand it: Younger audiences like brief, totally inconsequential and news-free items on ridiculously overexposed "young" "celebrities."

• Paris Hilton sleeps a little more soundly at night knowing that a teen has been sentenced for the hacking of her Sidekick. And so the infotainment industry exhales and Senator Durbin gets his much-needed closure. [eWEEK]
• Beyoncé pulls a David Pogue on Jay-Z. [Cityrag]
• NYC ranks as the most expensive rental market in America. We're number one! Thank you, Barbara CorcoDevil! [Forbes]
• Renée Zellwegger cites "fraud" as the reason behind her split from country singer Kenny Chesney. Huh? Did he trick her into thinking he loved her or something? [A Socialite's Life]
• Who can ever recall the name of Brooklyn's hip new band? [McSweeney's]
• Jonathan Safran Foer and Elijah Wood are extremely precocious and incredibly similar. [Radar]
• None too surprisingly, some of Fashion Week's best is far from the tents. [VV]

This is why we should be reading the Houston Chronicle more closely:

It seems that the reach of literary wunderjew Jonathan Safran Foer only goes so far: