Catch-22

Joseph Heller

Decades after the war that defined them, familiar characters from Joseph Heller’s world—older, unsettled, and still trapped in the logic of their own survival—find themselves confronting a new enemy: The End. In this darkly comic, audacious companion novel, Heller turns his razor-sharp satire toward America’s shifting myths, exposing the absurdity of politics, the decay of cities and institutions, and the greed and hypocrisy that keep reinventing themselves. With the same ferocious humor that made his earlier masterpiece a landmark of modern fiction, he builds a fun-house mirror of a society that insists on meaning while fraying at the edges. Closing Time is both outrageously funny and deeply serious, asking what it means to live through history—and what remains when the century finally closes.