Goodbye, Columbus: and Five Short Stories [Paperback]

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, Columbusis 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."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

In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize forAmerican Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts atthe White House and in 2002 the highest award of the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction.He twice won the National Book Award and the NationalBook Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/FaulknerAward three times. In 2005The Plot Against Americareceivedthe Society of American Historians’ Prize for “the outstandinghistorical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.”Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards:in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National HumanitiesMedal at the White House, and was later named the fourthrecipient of the Man Booker Intelƒ]