When a professor of French literature attends a tribute event in New York City for her old playwriting teacher, she remembers how young she was when their unconventional relationship transpired.

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

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.

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.

On a trip to Basel, a man falls in love with a middle-aged writer’s muse, creating a love triangle destined to fall apart under the weight of the old writer’s age.

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

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.

A research psychologist visits a peculiar asylum patient who recounts his life story. The patient warns the researcher about how obsession with the pursuit of knowledge can make one lose sight of their humanity until it is unsalvageable.

When a young man graduates college and inherits money from his grandfather, he decides to move to France for a year, hoping to feel more at home than he ever did in Chicago.

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.