When aliens land on a planet new to them, they find a population obsessed with a virtual reality and uninterested in the intense beauty of the natural world around them.

A mother and her three boys are on a small Greek island, where they prepare to reunite with her husband. Before they leave, they attend a party, and spend time reflecting on the possibility that they may never see their missing loved one again.

In this excerpt from a longer piece of work, multiple characters' lives intersect near an interplanetary brothel.

A woman’s desperate desire for love in Paris leads to her some dark places.

A young South African man traveling through Africa befriends a group of people and stays with them, following them north to Kenya. He becomes romantically attached to one of the young Swiss men, despite their language barrier, and they begin a hot-and-cold relationship.

A German hotel owner in Hawaii experiences a jolt of excitement in his life when a young woman who loves literature and detests flights as much as he does checks in his hotel with her husband.

In a world where inter-cultural communication is translated through an immerser, which Agnes has had on too long, her husband Galen meets with the restaurant owner to plan their fifth anniversary dinner, but one of the employees, Quy, recognizes Agnes’s addiction and tries to help.

In the midst of World War II, two lovesick foreigners meet at a nightclub in Rio and indulge in the company of each other while still languishing after previous relationships.

When a man marries a princess from Cimmeria, a country he believes he imagined into existence, he must come to terms with a culture that recognizes twins as a single person—a primary and their shadow—and the lengths a shadow twin would go to in order to become their own person.

An interstate road traveled by African souls is both filled with welcoming bazaar-style market stalls and dark, suspicious areas that most travelers and sellers avoid.