Switters, an anarchist pacifist who works for the government and carries a gun, chases after his teenage stepsister, only to become madly enamored of a nun a decade older than he is.

In this story for both children and adults, kindergartner Gracie decides to find out just what beer is and why her father likes it so much. Along the way she discovers more than she probably expected.

"When the stock market crashes on the Thursday before Easter, you an ambitious, although ineffectual and not entirely ethical young broker are convinced you're facing the Weekend from Hell. Before the market reopens on Monday, you're going to have to scramble and scheme to cover your butt, but there's no way you can anticipate the baffling disappearance of a 300-pound psychic, the fall from grace of a born-again monkey, or the intrusion in your life...

An Arab and a Jew open a restaurant together across the street from the United Nations. It sounds like the beginning of an ethnic joke, but it's the axis around which spins this gutsy, fun-loving, and alarmingly provocative novel, in which a bean can philosophizes, a dessert spoon mystifies, a young waitress takes on the New York art world, and a rowdy redneck welder discovers the lost god of Palestine, while the illusions that obscure humanity's...

This philosophical epic, with a large cast of characters, addresses the fervent desire of the human race to overcome the tyranny of aging and physical death.