A writing critic reviews the construction of Charles Chesnutt’s stories and how to write surfiction.

In a near future world, a famous computerized drama director is pushed beyond his artistic limits when a random science fiction writer asks him to adapt his novel for the digital stage—for the alluring incentive of real gold payment.

After struggling to appeal to their state governor, a dysfunctional family anxiously awaits the public execution of a relative. As they wait at home new of the execution, tensions and strife erupt in a dispute over the relative's innocence.

A creative writing teacher sits through a conference with one his favorite students. He takes us on a journey through the characters in the story, and in his life.

A son tells a series of stories, most of them about his father and stepfather. As the son describes a robbery that took place at his house in high school and his experiences with his father, a former Jehovah's Witness and current alcoholic, he begins to recall details from his childhood.

A teacher on the Lower East side meets a friendly man with a presence resembling a dead English poet.

A man reflects on the past week while an unexpected storm rages outside, and he compares the events that follow with the fall of the Roman Empire.

While narrating a story, a woman suppresses some details while highlighting others, to expose the injustice she witnesses in her neighbor's irresponsible behavior.

A teacher invites her adult students — many with personal ties to the Holocaust — to attend a symposium on genocide, but the event is interrupted by incessant screams of an unknown origin.

A man recalls his intimate friendship with his former English professor, who resolved to fuel his unsatisfied desire for playwriting during the time they were apart. In their reunion decades later, instead of the brilliant play he promised, the professor shows his former student a disturbing product of his mental instability.