SEWER BALLS

A NOVEL BY

STEVEN SCHINDLER    

A Review:  "Sewer Balls" is about growing up in the Bronx, NY, in the sixties, and Schindler writes with a style that reflects the best of Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" and Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint." Every kid who grew up in the East knows what sewer balls are: those prized rubber balls that were always going down the corner sewers and retrieved by daring poor kids.  Schindler brings the '60s alive with images as clear as if the were photographed; his sentences are deceptively simple but full of euphony.  It won't be surprising if someone in the next millennium writes that this was probably the best novel produced by the small presses in 1999.---The Small Press Review (March /April 2000)

A Review:     The Bronx has an allure.  Maybe it has a muse.  "The Wanderers", "Marty", and "A Bronx Tale" quickly come to mind when contemplating the presence of the Bronx in the arts...Steven Schindler's novel "Sewer Balls" adds to this fine lineage of the artistic depiction of the borough and its people.---Streetplay.com (June 2000)

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Sewer Balls 

 No balls? No money? No problem. Just have your buddy hold you by the ankles and lower you into a sewer, armed with a bent coat hanger. There are  plenty of balls down there for ready for scooping. And odds are, a couple of them are perfectly good for stick-ball or king-queen. So what if they're sewer balls. Oh, and one more thing: You better trust the guy who's holding you. I mean really trust him.

     JFK was shot dead. Oswald was shot "live" on TV. Girls were screaming like idiots over guys from England with long hair going "wooooh." And Sister Fidelis called the girls "tramps" right in front of the whole class. After seven torturous years at Presentation Grammar School, eighth grade was turning out to be more exciting than anyone ever thought it could be.

     For best friends Whitey and Vinny, every day was an adventure into a new, forbidden world of hidden kisses, stolen beer, and songs sung by guys with Moe Howard bangs that made the girls get weird. Little did they know that each of those adventures would take them a little bit deeper into a fast, unpredictable world where fun can turn into tragedy in a New York minute.

     Set against the backdrop of the Bronx in the early 1960s, Sewer Balls is a blunt, smart, quirky novel of how city kids with no money but lots of imagination make the most out of what they have.

     Was it fun? Was it scary? Was it the best time of their lives? Fuhgedahbowdit!