Philip Roth Opens Up About 'Portnoy's Complaint'

It's the book that made him not just famous but notorious, and one he rarely discusses publicly. 'Portnoy's Complaint,' Philip Roth's third novel, is the subject of this segment of TheDailyBeast.com's Web series, 'The Beast Bar.'

Roth tells Tina Brown that the novel "was a big marker... I dont have any regrets about writing it or publishing it."

• Category

  News & Politics

[uncoolbeans]

she probably meant greatest living american author

[pussycat niffums]

cont... instead an archaic and almost prophetic translation of the natural world into his books, where flora and fauna co-exists disastrously with man in the spiralling whirligig of his death-worlds.

[Cybrus07]

Are they flirting a little bit?

[zo219]

Portnoy's Complaint is actually--besides being funny as hell--a perfectly structured and written novel.

[Kendall Defoe]

Just finished reading it today. Not like anything he or anyone else has written in the last ten or twenty years. Too much fun to be serious; too literary to be real porn. Anyone aware of a remake of the terrible first film made of the book?

[Marie Sophie]

More aptly put...he is the greatest living American author of his generation.

[madamerotten]

I think "Internet" should be capitalized, but its lower-case form is generally accepted these days.

[madamerotten]

Your sentence fragment can be interpreted either as an admonition to copulate with me or as an epithet indicating disapproval of my lessons. I don't think I would like to copulate with you. However, I will always try to help you improve your English.

[madamerotten]

The first part of your comment is a sentence fragment. I prefer complete sentences. Please add a personal pronoun and a verb, so that your sentence states "You are also suffering from delusions of grandeur."

[madamerotten]

Thank you for including the closing quotation mark, this time. I am happy that I've had a positive influence on you.

[madamerotten]

The problem of the missing quotation mark is all your fault, regardless of any off-topic comments you may offer. You need to be more careful.

[madamerotten]

You need to add an end quotation mark to your last sentence.