Krauss, who grew up on Long Island,[7][8]New York, was born in Manhattan, New York City, to a British Jewish mother and an American Jewish father, an engineer and orthopedic surgeon[9] who grew up partly in Israel.[10]
Krauss's maternal grandparents were born in Germany and Ukraine and later emigrated to London. Her paternal grandparents were born in Hungary and Slonim, Belarus, met in Israel, and later emigrated to New York.[11]
Many of these places are central to Krauss's 2005 novel, The History of Love, and the book is dedicated to her grandparents.[8]
Krauss, who started writing when she was a teenager,[12][13] wrote and published mainly poetry[13][14] until she began her first novel in 2001.
In 1987, when Krauss's father traveled with his family to Switzerland to take up a medical fellowship in Basel, she was enrolled as a boarder in the International School of Geneva, where she pursued her secondary school studies in Year 9. Krauss's memories of that experience are conveyed in her autobiographical short story "Switzerland", published in 2020.[15]
Krauss enrolled in Stanford University in 1992, and that fall she met Joseph Brodsky[7] who worked closely with her on her poetry over the next three years. He also introduced her to the work of writers such as Italo Calvino and Zbigniew Herbert. In 1999, three years after Brodsky died, Krauss produced a documentary about his work for BBC Radio 3.[16]
She traveled to St. Petersburg where she stood in the "room and a half" where he grew up, made famous by his essay of that title. Krauss majored in English and graduated with honors, winning several undergraduate prizes for her poetry as well as the Dean's Award for academic achievement. She also curated a reading series with Fiona Maazel at the Russian Samovar, a restaurant in New York City co-founded by Roman Kaplan, Brodsky and Mikhail Baryshnikov.[17]
The title of Krauss's 2017 novel Forest Dark is derived from the opening lines of Dante's Inferno in which Dante is lost in a dark forest, shown here in this engraving by Gustave Doré
Her third novel, Great House, connects the stories of four characters to a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away. It was named a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize 2011[24] and also won an Award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards in 2011.[3]
In 2015 it was reported that Krauss had signed a $4 million deal with HarperCollins to publish her next two works: a novel, and also a book of short stories. The novel is entitled Forest Dark and was published in 2017.[25]Francesca Segal, writing in the Financial Times, describes it as a "richly layered tale of two lives" that explores "ideas of identity and belonging – and the lure of the Tel Aviv Hilton".[26] The novel's title is derived from the opening lines of Dante's Inferno, as translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.[27][28] The collection of short stories, To Be a Man, was published in 2020[4] and won the 2022 Wingate Literary Prize.[5][6]
In 2021, Krauss was the recipient of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and the first to receive the newly created Inspiration Award, introduced to mark the 15th anniversary of the prize.[30]
Themes
Krauss's work often explores the relationship between Jewish history and identity, the limited capacity of language and communication to produce understanding, loneliness, and memory. These themes are readily appreciable beginning in her first novel Man Walks Into a Room, wherein the protagonist loses years of lived memory while retaining all cognitive function. Playing with tenets of cognitive neuroscience and metaphysics, Man Walks Into a Room considers the relative roles of lived experience, materiality, and cognitive memory in shaping personal identity and being.
In a departure from her earlier work, Krauss's later novels progressively question and abandon traditional narrative structure in pursuit of themes more characteristic of late postmodern literature. Fragmentation and nonlinear narrative become increasingly present in her work through the use of multiple narrators whose narrative arcs may not directly meet but whose meanings are derived from resonance and pattern similarity (see The History of Love, Great House, Forest Dark). The History of Love and Forest Dark employ techniques of metafiction and intertextuality, questioning the veracity of the novel's form and antagonizing the traditional contract between reader and text.[31][32] The co-protagonist of Forest Dark in particular is a novelist who shares the author's name and several biographical details, including reflections on a failed marriage to a man with whom the character has two children, considerations of the constraints of fiction, a fascination with Franz Kafka's life and writing, and a preoccupation with "Jewish mysticism, Israel and creation."[33][34] In an August 2017 interview with The Guardian, Krauss is quoted saying:
“In a sense, the self is more or less an invention from beginning to end. What is more unreal, what is more a creation than the self? Why do we have such a heavy investment in knowing what is true and what isn’t true about people’s lives? Why is it even valid to make a distinction between autobiography, auto-fiction and fiction itself? What fiction doesn’t contain a deep reflection of the author’s perspective and memory and sense of the world?”[35]
Krauss lives in Brooklyn, New York.[37] She has two children, Sasha and Cy, by her former husband, the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. She and Foer married in 2004 and divorced in 2014.[37] Krauss subsequently embarked on a five-year relationship with the Israeli journalist and novelist Gon Ben Ari, whom she met when she granted him an interview several years earlier.[38][39]
^Joy Press (May 21, 2002). Living in Oblivion,Village Voice, Retrieved May 14, 2011. "Krauss is a fluent, thoughtful writer who takes on a lot of complex ideas and rarely loses her grip on them... Man Walks Into a Room is a chilling addition to the annals of amnesia lit. It's a novel that grapples with the ephemeral experience of being human and the realization that we create a lifetime of memories that vanish when we do".
