Cats in a Chowder

Schneider has given us a viciously funny book that does to the experiences of manhood, war and 60's Catholicism what blenders do to spirits -- with a resulting cocktail worthy of being served to the likes of Twain, David Foster Wallace, and John Kennedy Toole. A blurb can't hack it -- read this book!     —Michael C. Delisa, Author of Cinderella Man

After years of questionable guidance from most things holy, Brooklynite  and devout Yankee hater  Harry Sisler determines to be his own god, leading his family to the wilderness of 1950’s Long Island where the Ronkonkoma trees are filled with ticks and the friggin’ air squeaks. There he is driven by two moronic prophecies: that he will raise a centerfielder better than “the damn DiMaggio,” and that he will die promptly at the age of fifty. In this chowder of madness, desperate schemes of evacuation simmer. The Sisler family detonates, and Harry (one prophecy dead now) leaves it to chase his fortune to the new gold rush, the Alaskan pipeline of 1974. It is there, however, in the isolation of Alaska, that he must come face to face with his second prophecy, the timing of his own death. It is his final chance to be right about something, and completely in his own hands. Only the prodigal son Robin can save him. But for that to happen, Robin must shake his nagging ambiguity and become a man in is own right… and he’d damn well better hurry.

About the Author

 Fred j Schneider makes his home in upstate New York looking out over six waves of Adirondack Mountains. During the horrific dawn of disco, when the whole country was blinded by that insipid mirrored ball, he raged against the machine, exhausting his college years wearing a sweat-rimmed Met hat and quixotically paying homage to the, alas, all-too-mortal Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. It was useless, it was expensive, yet embers still burn. A humor essayist on Public Radio, Fred’s follow up novel, One Less Squirrel in Swellsville, is slated for publication in September 2008.