Closing Time

More about the book

Thirty-three years and over ten million copies later...the classic story continues. <p> Yossarian returns -- older, if not wiser -- to face a new foe.</p><p> An instant classic when published in 1961, Joseph Heller's <i>Catch-22</i> still ranks among the funniest -- and most serious -- novels ever written about war. Now Heller has dared to write the sequel to his 10-million copy bestseller, using many of <i>Catch-22</i>'s characters to deftly satirize the realities and the myths of America in the half century since they fought World War II. </p><p> In <i>Closing Time,</i> a comic masterpiece in its own right, Heller spears the inflated balloons of our national consciousness -- the absurdity of our politics, the decline of society and our great cities, the greed and hypocrisy of our business and culture -- with the same ferocious humor that he used against the conventional view of warfare. Back again are characters familiar from <i>Catch-22,</i> including Yossarian and Milo Minderbinder, the chaplain, and little Sammy Singer, as they come to the end of their lives and the end of the century -- all linked, this time, in uneasy peace and old age...fighting not the Germans, but The End. </p><p> Outrageously funny and totally serious, and as brilliant and successful as <i>Catch-22</i> itself, <i>Closing Time</i> is a fun-house mirror that captures, at once grotesquely and accurately, the truth about ourselves.</p>