By: J. C. Hallman,
on 3/10/2015
At first, I was dead set against it. I would not try to meet Nicholson Baker while I was writing a book about Nicholson Baker. I had a good reason for this. I didn't want to meet Baker because Baker, in U and I, his fretful, hand-wringing account of his literary relationship with John Updike, [...]
By: Maryann Yin,
on 12/24/2014
What fiction books do you typically like to recommend? Designer David McCandless created an infographic called “Novels Everyone Should Read” for his new book, Knowledge is Beautiful.
Some of the titles featured in this image include To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, and Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. We’ve embedded the entire graphic below for you to explore further. (via The Huffington Post)
(more…)
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Add a Comment
By: Powell's Staff,
on 4/29/2014
It's spring! The sun is shining. The flowers are in bloom. The Blazers are winning (fingers crossed). We're in a good mood. So for our latest round of Required Reading, we lined up our 25 favorite funny novels. Whether biting, riotous, savage, or slapstick, each of these books consistently makes us laugh. ÷ ÷ ÷ [...]
Happy birthday to Catch-22 author Joseph Heller, on what would have been his 89th. If you haven't read it (and you should), the novel follows Yossarian, a bombardier named stationed in Italy during World War II, who is as determined to escape the war alive as the military bureaucracy seems determined to kill him. Much of it reads like Abbott and Costello's "Who's on first?" with mortal consequences. Like this:
"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to, he was sane and had to."
There you go. As a comment on war's ability to bend reason and reality, Catch-22 has proved remarkably durable, spawing a line of absurdist horror stories. So, in honor of Heller's birdthday and the 51st anniversary of Catch-22's publication, here are five descendants of Heller's mad, mad, mad, mad masterpiece:
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
Our top pick for the Best Books of May, Ben Fountain's debut novel is "The Catch-22 of the Iraq war." Karl Marlantes, author of Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War, says so right on the jacket, and he would know. In his review, Amazon's Neal Thompson says Billy Lynn "manages a sly feat: giving us a maddening and believable cast of characters who make us feel what it must be like to go to war--and return."
Add a Comment
By: Dianna Dilworth,
on 10/25/2011
Auction house Nate D. Sanders has two letters from author Joseph Heller up for bid. In the letters, Heller discusses his Catch-22. Each letter is estimated to sell between $2,000 and $5,000. Bidding is open from now until Tuesday November 8th, the 50th anniversary of book.
Both letters were written from Heller to Professor James Nagel of Northeastern University in the early 1970s, more than a decade after the book was published in 1961. In each letter he discusses the influences that other books had on his writing Catch-22.
Here’s an excerpt: “I was about thirty when I began thinking about Catch-22. These were the years of the cold war, the McCarthy period, the Eisenhower years, the Korean War, and it was a sensibility shaped by these factors that infused the book rather than my own literal experiences. The literary influences of which I was conscious from the beginning and throughout were Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, to which there is a stronger similarity in the early sections of Catch-22 than I intended (though not so strong a resemblance as Milton Hindus asserts in Mosiac, Spring 1973) and Nobokov’s Laughter in the Dark, two books that just by chance happened to come into my hands almost successively.”
Interested parties can place bids online at www.NateDSanders.com or by phone at 310-440-2982.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Add a Comment
