A Hemingway scholar is convinced by a conman to forge a Hemingway story in order to get millions of dollars in a plot that may disrupt the omniverse, even as the famed author steps in to intervene.

A Canadian graduate student and his wife are living in France and often socialize with their peers at concerts and dinner parties. They soon make friends with an established novelist, but as the student continues to meet people he begins to question who he can trust and who his real friends are.

When a teenage girl in 1940s New York City finally conjures up the urge to demand some money that a friend owes her, she’s treated to an afternoon of conversation unlike anything she’s ever heard before.

A woman grows obsessed with a single book from the time she is a young adult to her death in old age, as the book's meaning changes for her over time.

After the suicide of his elderly and famous brother, an auto parts salesman recounts his brother's life and details his willingness to hurt everyone who loved him in the name of art.

An unassuming attendee of Gertrude Stein’s famed Paris salon reflects on his time as a writer. Twenty years after Stein’s passing, he realizes the profound truths of her life, art, and legacy.

Writing a foreword, a man reflects on his relationship to a writer and said writer's wife.

Passive and easily satisfied, Roger spends his days managing his secondhand bookstore The Pleiade. He worships modernist classics without fully reading them, he’s gregarious but seldom invited to dinner, and he types novel after novel methodically, but all are rejected. He passes seasons of love and loss in unfailing, impassive routine.

Though most of a prep school's students are away for the long weekend, a few boys stay behind at the dorms and are invited to dinner with a wealthy boy and his stepmother. At the dinner, the stepmother's attitude and appearance are just as alluring as the food, but the wealthy student acts strange and detached the whole evening.

An overweight journalist navigates a strange friendship with a legendary writer and finds his life curiously entwined with one of the writer's students, a fiery young girl.