Words cannot express how much I love this piece

Mostly because as I read this brilliant analysis by Emma Garman, I kept wondering why the hell no one has picked up on this publicly yet:

Take a tragically dead father, a good-hearted but distracted mother, and a clever kid engaged in a mystery-solving quest around New York. Add weighty historical background, aging WWII survivors, some plot-driving letters/diary entries/manuscript fragments, and you have the constituents of not one novel but two: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and The History of Love by his wife, Nicole Krauss.

One can only speculate as to what the couple was thinking when they made the decision—for this is no unwitting coincidence—to come out with sophomore novels obviously collaborative, so numerous are the similarities. Is it a cute postmodern joke? God knows Foer is fond of those. Or perhaps it’s a romantic statement: as we are joined in matrimony so is our work? (Naturally, the dedications are to each other.) Reading the novels back-to-back triggers the strange sensation of exiting an imaginary world only to immediately re-envision it through a slightly different lens.

Garman goes on to speculate that the release date timing was not coincidental, but it’s really hard to say whether Foer and Krauss’s publishers made a concerted effort to coordinate the pub dates, and I suspect there wasn’t much in the way of communication between publishers.

Of course, this means that the "coincidence? I think so!" hook will now reign supreme in book reviews to be written later for Krauss, or even for both books at the same time. But kudos to Garman for getting the jump on this first.