Description

Roth's award-winning first book instantly established its author's reputation as a writer of explosive wit, merciless insight, and a fierce compassion for even the most self-deluding of his characters.

Goodbye, Columbus is the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin, he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills, who meet one summer break and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender and that illuminate the subterranean conflicts between parents and children and friends and neighbors in the American Jewish diaspora.

About the Author

In the 1990s Philip Roth won America’s four major literary
awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle
Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for
Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath’s
Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for
American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book
Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist
(1998); in the same year he received the National
Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the
National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife
(1986) and the National Book Award for his first book,
Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human
Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos
of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received
his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain’s W. H.
Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he
received the highest award of the American Academy of
Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, given every six
years “for the entire work of the recipient.” In 2005 The
Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians
Award for “the outstanding historical novel on an
American theme for 2003—2004.” In 2007 Roth received the
PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman.

Praise for Goodbye, Columbus: and Five Short Stories…

"A masterpiece." —Newsweek

"Unlike those of us who come howling into the world, blind and bare, Mr. Roth appears with nails, hair, teeth, speaking coherently. He is skilled, witty, energetic and performs like a virtuoso." —Saul Bellow

"Superior, startling, incandescently alive." —The New Yorker