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Catch-22
  • Published: 20 December 2023
  • ISBN: 9781784878696
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 528
  • RRP: $40.00
Categories:

Catch-22

Formats & editions
Paperback
10 May 2019
Paperback
2 Feb 2004
Hardback
20 Dec 2023
EBook
8 June 2011
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VINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS: Bound to be beautiful

A beautiful hardback edition of one of the most subversive anti-war novels ever written - reading Catch-22 is a rite of passage.

Set in the closing months of World War II, this is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. His real problem is not the enemy - it is his own army which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. If Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions then he is caught in Catch-22: if he flies he is crazy, and doesn't have to; but if he doesn't want to he must be sane and has to. That's some catch...

'The greatest satirical work in the English language' Observer

'Wildly original, brutally gruesome, a dazzling performance...it will not be forgotten' New York Times

VINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS: Bound to be beautiful
  • Published: 20 December 2023
  • ISBN: 9781784878696
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 528
  • RRP: $40.00
Categories:

About the author

Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller was born in 1923 in Brooklyn, New York. He served as a bombardier in the Second World War and then attended New York University and Columbia University and then Oxford, the last on a Fullbright scholarship. He then taught for two years at Pennsylvania State University, before returning to New York, where he began a successful career in the advertising departments of Time, Look and McCall's magazines. It was during this time that he had the idea for Catch-22. Working on the novel in spare moments and evenings at home, it took him eight years to complete and was first published in 1961. His second novel, Something Happened was published in 1974, Good As Gold in 1979 and Closing Time in 1994. He is also the author of the play We Bombed in New Haven.

portrait photo of Joseph Heller

Also by Joseph Heller

Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition
Work
Good As Gold
Bodywise
Catch 22
Something Happened
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Praise for Catch-22

It is a rare book in that it has the ability to make you laugh out loud and be deeply moved within a few pages.

Adam Staten, British Journal of General Practice

Wildly original, brutally gruesome, a dazzling performance that will outrage as many readers as it delights. Vulgarly, bitterly funny, it will not be forgotten by those who can take it

New York Times

Blessedly, monstrously, bloatedly, cynically funny and fantastically unique. No one has ever written a book like this

Financial Times

Blessedly, monstrously, bloatedly, cynically funny, and fantastically unique. No one has ever written a book like this

Financial Times

An apocalyptic masterpiece

Chicago Times

It is the Rock and Roll of novels

Norman Mailer

Catch-22 is the only war novel I've ever read that makes any sense

Harper Lee

Once you "get it" it is a gripping and devastating insight into the pointlessness and bureaucracy of war and its consequences

The Times

The most devastating satire ever written about the lunacy of war and military bureaucracy

Antony Beevor