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Book Summary and Reviews of Closing Time by Joseph Heller

Closing Time by Joseph Heller

Closing Time

The Sequel to Catch-22

by Joseph Heller

  • Published:
  • Sep 1995, 464 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

A darkly comic and ambitious sequel to the American classic Catch-22.

In Closing Time, Joseph Heller returns to the characters of Catch-22, now coming to the end of their lives and the century, as is the entire generation that fought in World War II: Yossarian and Milo Minderbinder, the chaplain, and such newcomers as little Sammy Singer and giant Lew, all linked, in an uneasy peace and old age, fighting not the Germans this time, but The End. Closing Time deftly satirizes the realities and the myths of America in the half century since WWII: the absurdity of our politics, the decline of our society and our great cities, the greed and hypocrisy of our business and culture — with the same ferocious humor as Catch-22.

Closing Time is outrageously funny and totally serious, and as brilliant and successful as Catch-22 itself, a fun-house mirror that captures, at once grotesquely and accurately, the truth about ourselves.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Heller's sequel to his classic first novel, Catch-22, finds Yossarian and company again surrounded by greed, violence and insanity, this time in contemporary New York." —Publishers Weekly

"Contains a richness of tone and of human feeling...Powerful and disturbing." —The New York Times

 "Score one for Joseph Heller...Closing Time is Heller's best novel since Good as Gold." —The Philadelphia Inquirer

This information about Closing Time was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923. In 1961, he published Catch-22, which became a bestseller and, in 1970, a film. He went on to write such novels as Good as Gold, God Knows, Picture This, Closing Time, and Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man. Heller died in 1999.

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