The complete Henry Bech
Subtitle: twenty stories
By: John Updike ; with an introduction by Malcolm Bradbury.
Series: Everyman's library ;; 264
Publisher: Knopf; Distributed by Random House
Published: 2001
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 509
Subjects: Bech, Henry (Fictitious character) -- Fiction.; Humorous stories, American.; Jewish authors -- Fiction.
Genres: Fiction.
Description: "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 - here 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."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. xxii-xxiii) and index.
Table of contents: title: Bech : a book; title: Bech is back; title: Bech at bay; title: His oeuvre.