Catch-22 (Everyman's Library 220)

xxxix, [1], 568, [8] pp. 8vo. Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury. A burlesque epic in the tradition of The Good Soldier Schweik, Catch-22 exposes the absurdity of war by applying its own demented logic to America's involvement in Korea. "One of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read and a highly touted Hulu series starring George Clooney, Christopher Abbott, Kyle Chandler, and Hugh Laurie. One of the funniest books ever written, Joseph Heller's masterpiece about a bomber squadron in the Second World War's Italian theater features a gallery of magnificently strange characters seething with comic energy. The malingering hero, Yossarian, is endlessly inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war, and his story is studded with incidents and devices (including the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade and the hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule that gives the book its title) that propel the narrative in a headlong satiric rush. But the reason Catch-22's satire never weakens and its jokes never date stems not from the comedy itself but from the savage, unerring, Swiftian indignation out of which that comedy springs. This fractured anti-epic, with all its aggrieved humanity, has given us the most enduring image we have of modern warfare."