WNYC has audio from last weekend’s Phillip Roth 75th Birthday Extravaganza. There’s a panel discussion featuring Jonathan Lethem, Charles D’Ambrosio, and Nathan Englander about Phillip Roth and his influence on their work, and there’s also two other chunks of audio, including Roth’s own speech. Presumably, Roth doesn’t talk about his own influence on himself, because he covered that pretty well in Portnoy’s Complaint.

Lethem talks about the book The Breast, which is a highly underrated Roth novella, if such a thing is even possible. It’s a riff on The Metamorphosis, about a chauvinistic man who wakes up one day to find himself transformed into a giant breast. I hadn’t thought of that book in a while, and I was glad to be reminded of it.