“I wanted to be as unself-censored as I could be. I trust my instincts in writing, not in life,” said Jonathan Safran Foer, 28-year-old critically acclaimed author when talking about how he wrote his latest best selling novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.”

The narrative follows Oskar Schell, a boy, his exact age is never clear, but between 8-12, on his journey throughout New York City on a search for the origin of an old-fashioned key in an envelope labeled black (in red pen) that his father, who had been killed on Sept. 11 had left.

The novel, however, had a very different start. The original manuscript told a different story about a man in Germany told in diary format but as Foer continued to write the locales and characters morphed.

“Then all of these images began to change, birds became airplanes,” said Foer. “I eventually showed a draft to my little brother who said it seems as though you are writing around 9/11.”

So he had to ask himself why he was writing around such a huge issue instead of taking it on head on and the answer he gave is he never thought about writing about the terrorist attacks on the U.S. on Sept 11.

“The only thing that occurred to me was never to write about 9/11,” said Foer. He said that after Sept. 11 when he went to readings many authors said they were going to write on it and so far he is the only one.

This book is much more than a narrative journey through the five boroughs (well, six if you believe Schell’s father in flashbacks about how there used to be six boroughs in New York City,) it is a visual one also.

The book is full of images, some are quite obviously linked and some take a little more thought to see the connection. But the process of finding the images was organic. For some the idea came first and then he found the image and others he found the image and then the idea came second.

The last image of the book, actually series of images, is the most compelling. The images, in flip book style show a body “falling up” into the World Trade Center. The act of flipping the pages makes the reader part of the process.

“The most important image of the last 20 or 50 years. I wanted to somehow express how important it was,” said Foer. “Sometimes the only way to present something interesting is to present the opposite.”

His first book, “Everything is Illuminated” was a best-seller and the unpublished manuscript started a bidding war between multiple publishing houses. Not that the success has gone to his head. He always wonders who are these people come to his readings said Foer.

“It is an incredibly humbling experience,” he said.

When asked how he sees himself, his answer was oblique, “it’s a funny idea to ‘see’ yourself.”

But when asked how he would define himself he had a direct answer.

“Read my books. That is exactly the reason I write.”