In a world where there is no smell, taste, pain, death, or digestion, the people are left hungering for one thing: love.

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.

A privileged young woman from New England falls in love with a practical Midwesterner, but can their love withstand the grief of losing a child?

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 Native American woman reminisces on the story her great-grandfather would tell about running away with her great-grandmother. The woman draws parallels between the story and her own first love.

A man tries to determine the cost of a passionate but brief love affair, and his calculations lead him to a solemn but hopeful realization.

In post-World War II Japan, a boy is raised by his frigid father without love and spends the rest of his life endlessly pursuing it.

After his best friend dies, a man is forced to spend time with the widow of the dead man and remember the complicated love triangle the three of them had.

Vignettes of a number of relationships, most of them troubled, are glimpsed through the descriptions of creatures in this bestiary of the imaginary.

A lustful, rhapsodic husband makes an unsuccessful attempt to seduce his distant wife and is surprised when the tables soon turn.