Closing Time

The Sequel to Catch-22

by Joseph Heller

Yossarian and many of the other characters from CATCH-22 are back in this sequel to the earlier novel. As blackly humorous as its predecessor, CLOSING TIME is about a vast government conspiracy that is directly connected to hell, which is populated by dead writers. When Yossarian--now 68--inadvertently finds out about this phenomenon, Heller's novel enters the blackly absurd territory of which he is a master. His characters, however, also exhibit a strain of melancholy as they mourn the passing of the old days, rail against the decline of America in general and New York City in particular, and feel the nearness of their own mortality.

Editions of Closing Time

ISBN 9780684804507	Binding/Format Paperback	Publisher Scribner	Date 1995	Price $3.00	Very Good
ISBN 9781568952826	Binding/Format Paperback	Publisher Wheeler Pub Inc	Date 1996	Price $2.41	Very Good
ISBN 9780671746049	Binding/Format Hardcover	Publisher Simon & Schuster	Date 1994	Price $1.00	Good
ISBN 9780671044312	Binding/Format Audio Cassette	Publisher Simon & Schuster	Date 1994	Price $6.99	Good
ISBN 9780671505721	Binding/Format Audio Cassette	Publisher Simon & Schuster	Date 1994	Price $1.00	Good

Publisher Notes

Thirty-three years and over ten million copies later... the classic story continues. Yossarian returns-- older, if not wiser-- to face a new foe. An instant classic when published in 1961, Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" 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 "Catch-22's" characters to deftly satirize the realities and the myths of America in the half century since they fought World War II. In "Closing Time", 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 "Catch-22", 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. Outrageously funny and totally serious, and as brilliant and successful as "Catch-22" itself, "Closing Time" is a fun-house mirror that captures, at once grotesquely and accurately, the truth about ourselves.

Media Reviews

"[CLOSING TIME'] contains a richness of narrative tone and of human feeling lacking in CATCH-22']."

First Line

When people our age speak of the war it is not of Vietnam but of the one that broke out more than half a century ago and swept in almost all the world.

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