Early in the twentieth century, three children of poor Jewish immigrants stagger beneath the grueling promise of the American Dream. Nate Cohen, the pint-size, angry son of an alcoholic San Francisco prizefighter and Bohemian mother, becomes a parttime criminal. Working at a restaurant, he hurls bacon grease at an anti-Semitic employee and flees the city. As Ned Christianson, he cooks on cattle ranches in Northern California and Wyoming. After sleeping with a rancher’s daughter, Ned joins a Wild West show. Kayleh Rubenstein, a red-headed tailor’s daughter, becomes the child vaudeville star Clara Robbins. Her Uncle Henry (Zeev) manages her then sells her contract to a vaudeville star who abuses her and, when she finally resists, destroys her career. Clara descends into liquor and morphine. Jake Orlinsky, a New York orphan, performs as the child-magician Joseph Hartwig in a saloon below a brothel. After losing his job, he picks pockets and entertains on the street. Harry Houdini briefly befriends him. Following a fatal run-in at a New York nightclub, Jake escapes to California. The three young performers, all hiding their Jewish identities, meet at San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Clara and Joseph have a brief affair. All go south to Los Angeles, ultimately seeking careers in silent films. Through the ex-gunfighter and lawman Wyatt Earp, Ned and Joseph are hired for a western—and get fired. Clara becomes the kept woman of a series of Hollywood executives and is raped at the home of Fatty Arbuckle. A murder prompts Ned and Joseph to leave Los Angeles. A suicide sends Clara north. They reunite in San Francisco where two violent events lead to tragedy and redemption.

Every morning, Little Ned puts on his pants, his shirt, his shoes and, while he's at it, his heavy-duty chest armour, his spikey metal gauntlets, his razor-sharp sword and his iron helmet. What could possibly go wrong? Hilarious and heartwarming, surprising and brilliantly drawn, Little Ned is a story about the pitfalls of being too careful.

Three separate stories describe the experiences of a six-year-old boy living in West Virginia in the 1950s.

Big Ned died the way everyone assumed he would. Being a jerk. But no one ever guessed what sort of problem he would leave behind, that problem being... Big Ned’s Guest, a novella by Jake Wilhelm Left to handle Big Ned’s sins is his son. Little Ned is about to confront his father’s evils – the ones he knew about, and the horrors he didn’t know about. When he comes out of this, can he be a better man than Big Ned? Or does the apple simply not fall far from the tree?