A twenty-two-year-old male tutor gives various women feedback on their writing in letter form. When he quits his job, he visits one of his former correspondents for lunch at her apartment.

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

When a serial writer decides that he can’t take more of his monotonous life, he destroys his copywriter and leaves his domestic prison to protest the rise of the machines.

A writer receiving feedback from a professor on their drafts is sure that the person on the other end is a man. They wrestle with their own hidden identities until the end of their literary relationship comes with an unexpected revelation.

An accomplished but ineffectual columnist searches for fulfillment, until a death in the family causes him to question the family he took for granted.

A stubborn and grumpy letter writer is detained in a palace for the crimes of his so-called brother during the Iranian Revolution.

A young couple obsessed with syntax sets off to meet their favorite author.

A seventh-grade English teacher copes with the recent death of her father and assigns a memoir that her students love reading. However, their parents question her for her pedagogical choices because of the swear words and provocative topics in the book.

A catalog of the tools different alien species use to read and write, leading to fundamental questions about what it means to make patterns of knowledge against the noise of the universe.

Following a messy breakup, an MIT graduate and a PhD student at Indiana University separately talk about the problems in their former relationship in two spliced-together conversations, exploring conflicts surrounding language, intimacy, commitment, and intellectualism.