A Stanford undergraduate student in the 1950s attempts to make friends and work out his professional goals. His academic and life path become drastically altered when his Hungarian roommate falls into depression.

A female professor at a contemporary university remembers an old conversation with a former teacher of hers, which prompts her to reconsider her job, solitude, and love of reading.

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.

A mid-career academic at a New England college confronts a plagiarizing frat boy and unearths her own troubled past as a graduate student navigating a male-dominated field in the process.

A professor finds himself attracted to one of his students, allowing her to skip the final exams - but her resultant grade causes her to lash out at him and reveal harsh truths about his own life that he finds difficult to accept.

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.

At the end of the world, a girl resolves to finish her English paper.

A disgruntled college professor in Mississippi takes an interest in one of his students, a budding writer, and tries to find him a girlfriend.

A first-generation college student, hours from graduating, dreads leaving school and her faculty mentor for the "real world" and her traditional, Eastern European parents.

Ruthie, an experienced writer, reflects on the scholarship opportunity that set her career in motion.