From Our Editors
Catch-22 is like no other novel we have ever read. It has its own style, its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. It moves back and forth from hilarity to horror. It is outrageously funny and strangely affecting. National ads/media.
From the Publisher
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Arguably the best novel to come out of World War II, in which
Heller strips away the veneer of martial glory to expose its
insanity, and gives our language a new paradoxical phrase to
describe mankind at the mercy of its own institutions.
About the Author
American novelist and dramatist Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn,
N.Y. on May 1, 1923. Heller started off his writing career by
publishing a series of short stories, but he is most famous for his
satirical novel Catch-22. Set in the closing months of World War
II, Catch-22 tells the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who
discovers the horrors of war and its aftereffects. This novel
brought the phrase "catch-22," defined in Webster's Dictionary as
"a situation presenting two equally undesirable alternatives," into
everyday use. Heller wrote Closing Time, the sequel to Catch-22, in
1994. Other novels include As Good As Gold and God Knows. He also
wrote No Laughing Matter, an account of his struggles with
Guillain-Barr Syndrome, a neurological disorder, in 1986.
Thirty-five years after writing his first book, Heller wrote his
autobiography, entitled Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here. In
his memoirs, Heller reminisces about what it was like growing up in
Coney Island in the 1930s and 1940s. On December 13, 1999, Heller
died of a heart attack in his home on Long Island. His last novel,
Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, was published shortly after
his death.
A professor of English literature and American studies who has
published numerous critical works, Malcolm Bradbury is also a
novelist whose protagonists are academics who make muddles of their
personal and professional lives. He maintains that his main concern
is to explore problems and dilemmas of liberalism and issues of
moral responsibility. The targets of Bradbury's satires include
intellectual pretension, cultural myopia, and official smugness.
His protagonists are largely sympathetic, if comic, failures at
mastering their own fates in a world of absurd rules and
regulations. His major novels include Eating People Is Wrong
(1959), Stepping Westward (1965), and The History Man (1975). This
last, a novel of intellectual and political conflict at an English
university in the late 1960s, was made into a successful television
minidrama. More recent novels include Rates of Exchange (1983) and
Cuts (1987).
Hardcover
624 Pages, 5.3 x 8.38 x 1.36 IN
October 17, 1995
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
0679437223
9780679437222