An enigmatic, aging nightclub hostess finds her cool exterior challenged when an unexpected marriage proposal comes from a millionaire admirer.

A young man invites a tourist to his favorite London café and recounts the strangest affair he’d ever had with a woman he picked up there; a woman who challenged and changed him. A young, beguiling man picks a tourist out of a group and invites him to see the real sites of London, not the tired and disappointing spectacles. He takes the tourist to the Café de Paris, an old but grand establishment with the promise of dancing and young ladies. The man admonishes his companion to loosen up, stay and drink, and while they wait for the evening to unfold the man begins a story.

The standing of a Kansas City burlesque show with twisted secrets is threatened by the local political climate as police officers target the provocative business.

A young screenwriter in Los Angeles is exposed to the corruption beneath the glamorous Hollywood lifestyle after befriending a director and his wife.

Two men putting on a production for their New York theater company seek out a legendary, elderly actor, but upon finding him, they meet a man as dilapidated as the theater he once worked for.

A piano player recounts the various women he fell devastatingly in love with, breaking his heart and making the city in which he lives unbearable.

Sitting at a bar, a man reminisces about his past experiences with love and develops a philosophy for 'beautiful' relationships that relies on the inevitability of their ends.

A man walks into a bar in Atlanta and becomes intrigued by a clique of regulars. After marrying one of their sisters, causing a rift between her and her brother, he realizes that the bar will not cure his loneliness.

Protagonist Leo Gold attends the annual Anarchists’ Convention in New York City, a spectacle predictably filled with divisions and subcommittees and impassioned debates over topics as banal as the order of events and whether dinner should be self-serve. But when the hotel manager asks the party to vacate the room as previously booked, the group unites to build barricades and sing protest songs to defend their noble cause.

A divorced playwright living in an expat community in Mexico spends a night ricocheting between a dilettantish friend's household, his play, his ex-wife, and his own demons as he descends into an intense marijuana high.