Closing Time

By: Joseph Heller

Narrated by: Elliott Gould

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 best seller, 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.

©1995 Joseph Heller (P)2004 Simon & Schuster