Closing Time by Joseph Heller; Abridged MP3 Audio Book; Narrator 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 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.

Robert Pinsky, The Washington Post Manic, knockdown verbal comedy.

Christopher Buckley, The New Yorker A summing up by one of the last of the great writers of the Second World War generation;...we can celebrate Catch-22's anniversary by welcoming Yossarian, Sammy, Milo, Lew, Wintergreen, and Chaplain Tappman even as we take leave of them.

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

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

Robert Pinsky The Washington Post A lively, brilliant and influential writer's look back at the 20th-century American culture he has seen.

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

Christopher Buckley The New Yorker A summing up by one of the last of the great writers of the Second World War generation...we can celebrate Catch-22's anniversary by welcoming Yossarian, Sammy, Milo, Lew, Wintergreen, and Chaplain Tappman even as we take leave of them.

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 (the sequel to Catch-22), and Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man. Heller died in December 1999.