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

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

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

Searching for a muse to inspire a novel he is attempting to write, an author in San Francisco finds his passions ignited by something much more sinister.

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 young writer attends a writer's workshop where she begins a relationship with an author whose books she loves. But after they move in together, she finds that his life begins to suffuse every aspect of hers.

A writer receiving feedback from a professor on their drafts is sure that the person on the other end is a man. They wrestle with their own hidden identities until the end of their literary relationship comes with an unexpected revelation.

When a mysterious new member joins a group of struggling authors, the friends discover that they may have a supernatural creature in their midst, who can grant a single author success above all the others—but at a cost.

An elderly academic with an anxious wife is enlivened by a trip to New York, where he has an unlikely series of encounters with the peculiar woman who sat beside him on the plane.

In California, a young woman reflects on her relationship to her father while working on a novel. Through reading her father’s novel, she understands their relationship through his eyes.