A Los Angeles speech pathologist is assigned to the case of a presumably mentally-ill woman who speaks in gibberish that turns out to be Old English. When the woman disappears, deciphering her mysterious writing leads the pathologist to wonder if she has stumbled across a time traveler.

In Spain during the Francoist dictatorship, a girl's father insists that their family will never speak Spanish again in favor of Basque — a small act of political defiance that slowly changes their lives, until they can never go back.

An old linguistics researcher is ousted from his university position on the frontier of a small island he acculturated. Upon his return home, he begins to believe that he and his life's work are marginal.

A Laotian six-year-old, whose parents can't read English, struggles in school.

When a guitar-wielding teenage girl moves into the house next door, a boy suddenly finds his world of stellar debate performance and strict Nigerian parentage at odds with his newfound love of heavy metal.

When her older sister comes home for the summer, a girl contemplates girlhood and what it means to be a teenager.

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

Nana, a twenty-nine year old Ghanaian-American man from Cleveland, tries to repair his relationships with Sassy, his high school sweetheart, and Edwin, his Princeton-educated older brother, when Edwin comes home for the first time in five years.

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.

When her child refuses to take off his Halloween costume because he’s decided that he’s a Mongolian nomad, an ESL teacher in Portland finds herself stuck in an absurd conflict that further strains her suffering marriage.