A book illustrator spends her free time being a house-sitter, imagining what her life might be like if she lived in their houses. When she goes to work for a certain publisher, the connection they find through their work deepens until the two fall in love, but she worries her satisfaction is fleeting.

Writing a foreword, a man reflects on his relationship to a writer and said writer's wife.

A Boston-based publicist believes that he has found the next hit novel and signs a deal with the author. Later, he feels betrayed upon learning that the true author of the book is less than human.

In the depths of his mind, a writer tries to uncover the autonomous, nefarious motivations of his own characters.

A publisher who once gave his job to a young man he believed to be starving confronts the now-pretentious writer who never thanked him for 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.

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

A writer for the ’60s most famed and experimental television series watches the shows phantasmic creator choose between recluse genius and a quaint life of normalcy. Faced with stubborn alcoholism, a hit television series resemblant of the twilight zone, and a tree stump with questionably magical properties, the narrator watches cinematic wunderkind David Findley toe the line between brilliance and delusion.

In modern day NYC, an unmarried, fifty-something-year-old lawyer takes a year off work to contemplate her fate and plunges into an obsession with the life of the 19th century writer George Eliot—and with recreating Eliot's lifelong love affair.