White Asparagus

Welcome to the real and imagined worlds of D. R. Belz, where you’ll find: a practicing white witch kindergarten teacher whose practical joke brings a strange consequence; a young priest-in-training who encounters a literal femme fatale; a homeless man who finds a baby in a trash bin on Christmas morning-and something more; a catalog of bizarre mail-order products you won’t find anywhere else in the universe; an agency in Washington where a million monkeys type out Shakespeare; a suburban doctor who emotionally starves his ailing wife to death; a future in which families employ professional Readers; a cookbook of international cuisine with “real-ingredient” recipes . . . and more.