Portnoy’s Complaint: A Novel

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

“Deliciously funny . . . absurd and exuberant, wild and uproarious . . . a brilliantly vivid reading experience”—The New York Times Book Review

From Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Roth, the hilarious and bewildering psycho-sexual novel that sparked international controversy and made Roth a literary celebrity.

Alexander Portnoy is a deeply neurotic Jewish lawyer and Portnoy's Complaint is his scandalous confessions to his psychiatrist. He is a sex addict who can’t get laid. A traumatized child who grew into an underdeveloped man. He has countless fantasies, each more disturbed than the last. He is usually too afraid to act on them. He is obsessed with his mother, who used to threaten him with a bread knife, and resentful of his father, who was chronically constipated. He is a compulsive masturbator. Alexander Portnoy is a pleasure-seeking, overly altruistic, catastrophically libidinal, Freudian-wet-dream of a pervert.

“Roth is the bravest writer in the United States. He’s morally brave, he’s politically brave. And Portnoy is part of that bravery.” - Cynthia Ozick, Newsday

“Deliciously funny…absurd and exuberant, wild and uproarious…a brilliantly vivid reading experience. - New York Times

“Simply one of the two or three funniest works in American fiction.” - Chicago Sun-Times

“Touching as well as hilariously lewd…. Roth is vibrantly talented…as marvelous a mimic and fantasist as has been produced by the most verbal group in human history.” - New York Review of Books

"The most outrageously funny book about sex written." - The Guardian

“Philip Roth’s gift for fantasy, his superb dialogue, his ability to evoke places and atmospheres, make Portnoy’s Complaint once hilariously, scabrously funny and deeply moving.”  - Financial Times