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, widely acclaimed as among Robbins's very best. As a dessert spoon mystifies, a waitress takes on the art world and a rowdy redneck discovers the lost god of Palestine, the illusions that obscure humanity's view of the true universe fall away, one by one. A defiant and upbeat novel that refuses to look away from the end of the world.