Books like Goodbye, Columbus
A young Jewish man in 1950s New Jersey navigates his first encounters with class, sex, and the gap between the suburban dream and its spiritual emptiness.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Goodbye, Columbus
American Pastoral
A successful Jewish-American glove manufacturer watches his family and his country unravel in the aftermath of the 1960s counterculture.
A Simple Story
In a small Galician town at the turn of the century, Hirshl, the son of a prosperous shopkeeper, falls for his poor orphaned cousin Blume, who works as a servant in his parents' house.
4 3 2 1
Archie Ferguson is born in Newark in 1947 and grows up four times over, in four interleaved lives shaped by different accidents of fate, in Auster's most ambitious novel.
The Plot Against America
An alternate history where Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in 1940 and steers America towards fascism, told through a Jewish family in Newark watching their country betray them.
Luster
Edie, a young Black woman in New York with a failing publishing job and a painting habit, starts seeing a white man in an open marriage and ends up living in his New Jersey house with his wife and their adopted daughter.
Love in a Fallen City
Stories of love and money in Shanghai and Hong Kong in the 1940s; in the title novella, a divorced woman goes to Hong Kong to win a rich playboy, and the Japanese attack.
The Stories of John Cheever
Sixty-one stories of the American suburbs and cities after the war, from The Enormous Radio to The Swimmer.
Table for Two
Six short stories set mostly in New York and a novella that follows Eve Ross from Rules of Civility to 1938 Hollywood, each turning on a chance meeting or a decision made over a meal.
The Magic Barrel
Stories of poor Jews in New York and of Americans in Italy, among them the title story of a rabbinical student and the marriage broker who finds him a bride.
The Netanyahus
In 1959, an American Jewish professor at a remote college is assigned to host the visiting Israeli historian Benzion Netanyahu and his three unruly sons, one of them a future Prime Minister.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
A young writer looks back on the wartime year he lived downstairs from Holly Golightly, a Manhattan café-society girl with a past she keeps rewriting and a cat she refuses to name.
A Room with a View
A young woman visits Florence and discovers that passion and spontaneity offer more than the propriety she was raised to value.