Skip to content

The Complete Henry Bech : Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury
Stock Photo: Cover May Be Different

The Complete Henry Bech : Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury Hardcover - 2001

by Updike, John

  • Used

Collected in one volume for the first time--and featuring a final, series-capping story, "His Oeuvre"--John Updike's Bech stories have been a fixture of the American literary imagination since they first began appearing in "The New Yorker" more than 30 years ago. Ribbon marker.

Description

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Used - Very Good. Used book that is in excellent condition. May show signs of wear or have minor defects.
Used - Very Good
NZ$18.24
FREE Shipping to USA Standard delivery: 4 to 14 days
More Shipping Options
Ships from Better World Books (Nevada, United States)
The BIBLIO Guarantee | Ask Seller a Question

Details

  • Title The Complete Henry Bech : Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury
  • Author Updike, John
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Edition First Edition
  • Condition Used - Very Good
  • Pages 544
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, New York
  • Date 2001-03-27
  • Features Bookmark, Bibliography, Index
  • Bookseller's Inventory # 12531222-6
  • ISBN 9780375411762 / 0375411763
  • Weight 1.24 lbs (0.56 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.32 x 5.32 x 1.23 in (21.13 x 13.51 x 3.12 cm)
  • Library of Congress subjects Jewish fiction, Humorous stories, American
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 00053488
  • Dewey Decimal Code FIC

About Better World Books Nevada, United States

Biblio member since 2010
Seller rating: This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.

Not everyone has access to a book the way you do, which is why Better World Books cares. We have donated millions of books and raised millions of dollars to support literacy, libraries and education. Every Better World Books purchase you make contributes. Oh yeah, great prices, fast delivery, unique titles and a generous return policy - we’ve got that too. Thank you for shopping with us!

Terms of Sale:

Better World Books wants every single one of its customers to be happy with their purchase. If you are not satisfied your purchase or simply find out that it was not the book you were looking for, please e-mail us at: help@betterworldbooks.com. We will get back to you as soon as possible with directions on how to return the book to our warehouse. Please keep in mind that because we deal mostly in used books, any extra components, such as CDs or access codes, are usually not included. CDs: If the book does include a CD, it will be noted in the book's description ("With CD!"). Otherwise, there is no CD included, even if the term is used in the book's title. Access Codes: Unless the book is described as "New," please assume that the book does *not* have an access code.

Browse books from Better World Books

Summary

Henry Bech, the celebrated author of Travel Light, has been scrutinized, canonized and vilified by critics and readers across the world. Here, the experiences of this bemused literary icon, one of Updike's greatest creations, are described in hilarious detail, as he travels the world struggling to break his writer's block; returns to his native America to find new success with Think Big, his all-time blockbuster; and visits communist Czechoslovakia, where he is greeted by a dizzyingly adoring public. Brilliantly comic and deeply poignant, The Complete Henry Bech is one of the greatest of all explorations of the writing life and of what happens when an writer becomes a literary celebrity.

From the publisher

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. He was the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. He died in 2009.

From the jacket flap

Since tales of his exploits began appearing in "The New Yorker more than thirty years ago, Henry Bech, John Updike's playfully irreverent alter-ego, has charmed readers with his aesthetic dithering and his seemingly inexhaustible libido. The Bech stories--collected in one volume for the first time, and featuring a final, series-capping story, "His Oeuvre"--cast an affectionate eye on the famously unproductive Jewish-American writer, offering up a stream of wit, whimsy, and lyric pungency unmatched in American letters.
From his birth in 1923 to his belated paternity and public apotheosis as a spry septuagenarian in 1999, Bech plugs away, globetrotting in the company of foreign dignitaries one day and schlepping in tattered tweeds on the college lecture circuit the next. By turns cynical and naive, wry and avuncular, and always amorous, he is Updike's most endearing confection--a Lothario, a curmudgeon, and a winsome literary icon all in one. A perfect forum for Updike's limber prose, "The Complete Henry Bech is an arch portrait of the literary life in America from an incomparable American writer.

Media reviews

"A deft poke at what it means to be a writer in America." —New York Times

"In his extraordinarily productive career, John Updike has given us a multitude of memorable characters, but none more lovable than the high-minded, mild-mannered, rather hapless writer Henry Bech." —Chicago Tribune

"One of Updike’s best creations." —Life

"Bech is Updike’s alter ego, a mouthpiece for Updike’s often sarcastic, even caustic insight into writers and the writing life … [His] style is never more jubilantly elaborate than in a Bech book, and his intelligence never more provocatively displayed." —Booklist

"As imaginative territory, literary Manhattan has proved irresistible to Updike the satirist, and he has done it full justice and then some in his volumes of stories concerning the doings of New York novelist Henry Bech." —The New Criterion

"A mordantly comic look at literary life." —TIME

Citations

  • Kirkus Reviews, 02/01/2001, Page 144
  • Publishers Weekly, 02/26/2001, Page 61

About the author

JOHN UPDIKE was the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels, including The Centaur, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2009.

Hang on… we’re fetching the requested page.