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Goodbye, Columbus
  • Published: 1 December 2006
  • ISBN: 9780099498155
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $24.99

Goodbye, Columbus

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Philip Roth's first book, which won the National Book Award for Fiction, now reissued in electric new backlist style

Philip Roth’s debut novella and Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

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 and fall 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 - sometimes iconoclastic, sometimes elegiac - that crackle with irreverent originality and display Roth's blazing early talent.

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

‘Opening the first page of any Philip Roth is like hearing the ignition on a boiler roar into life. Passion is what we're going to get, and plenty of it’ Guardian
  • Published: 1 December 2006
  • ISBN: 9780099498155
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Philip Roth

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933, to second-generation Americans Bess and Herman. He grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood his writing returned to time and again. Roth received the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), but it was his fourth, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) which secured his reputation as one of America’s finest writers, and American Pastoral (1997) which won the Pulitzer Prize. Roth wrote thirty-one books in all, winning the International Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice. He was presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively. Roth died aged eighty-five on 22 May 2018, six years after retiring from writing.
portrait photo of Philip Roth

Also by Philip Roth

The Humbling
Nemesis
Indignation
Exit Ghost
The Facts
When She Was Good
Letting Go
See all

Praise for Goodbye, Columbus

Startlingly, incandescently alive

New Yorker

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 great novella - amazingly, this was Roth's first book - about love, sex and growing up

Observer

Opening the first page of any Philip Roth is like hearing the ignition on a boiler roar into life. Passion is what we're going to get, and plenty of it

Guardian