Goodbye, Columbus

Name: Goodbye, Columbus
ISBN: 9780063499676

And Five Short Stories

Philip Roth

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER

The prize-winning first book that instantly established Philip Roth as a major literary voice and as an unflinching, sharp observer of life—especially Jewish lives in postwar America. Goodbye, Columbus follows the relationship between Neil Klugman, a working-class kid from Newark, and pretty, Radcliffe-bound Brenda Patimkin from the wealthy suburbs. They embark on a summer affair that introduces Neil to a new and unsettling society of sex, leisure, and loss. The novella is accompanied by five remarkable short stories that illuminate the lives of the American Jewish diaspora.

“Superior, startling, incandescently alive.” —The New Yorker

“Brilliant. . . . Both entirely like and distinct from everything Roth wrote later." —The Times Literary Supplement

“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

"A masterpiece." —Newsweek

About the Author

Philip Roth (1933–2018) was one of the most prolific and provocative American novelists of the twentieth century. Born in Newark, New Jersey, the city that anchors much of his fiction, he made his debut with Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award in 1960. He went on to publish more than thirty books, among them Portnoy's Complaint, The Ghost Writer, American Pastoral, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America. His recurring alter egos, Nathan Zuckerman and David Kepesh, allowed him to probe Jewish American identity, desire, mortality, and the pressures of history with relentless candor. Roth received the National Jewish Book Award three times, the National Book Award twice, the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, the PEN/Faulkner Award three times, the Man Booker International Prize, and the National Medal of Arts. He retired from writing in 2012 and died in New York in 2018.