Closing Time

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.