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

After Anton Chekhov's slow death from tuberculosis, his wife Olga sends a hotel-boy on an important errand to ensure that no attention is called to the death of the famous Russian playwright.

A college student uses brutal method acting techniques to rehearse Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull under a tyrannical director. In the process, he and his co-star confront their own misery and arising feelings of love.

In Michigan, a recently divorced professor reflects on what it means to exist, first alone in his empty apartment and then alongside his student in a mission to find a missing girl.

A professor tries to convey to his students the magnitude of the most perfectly crafted poem ever written in the English language: “Lycidas.”

A deceased man’s friends and coworkers try to come up with the best way to mourn him and comfort his widow, even though it seems like she doesn’t need it.

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.

In this metafiction, the many lives of an unnamed man are scrutinized as he passes through millennia.

In 1990s Leningrad, a Russian man prepares to emigrate, but things don't quite go as planned—twists of fate, complex friendships, and the omnipresent KGB stand in his way.

A man reflects on his complicated summers with his father.