NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER
"A masterpiece."-Newsweek
"Superior, startling, incandescently alive."-The New Yorker
"Brilliant. . . . Both entirely like and distinct from everything Roth wrote later." -The Times Literary Supplement
Philip Roth's first book instantly established its author's reputation as a writer of explosive wit, merciless insight, and 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 conflict between parents and children and friends and neighbors in the American Jewish diaspora.
