Everything all at once in word form.

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.

An author discusses with his friend the best way to write about a poor aunt. Their words take on a new power when he manifests a literal poor aunt on his back and draws in spectators.

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

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 woman has an affair with a female lover who works in retouching models and imagines retouching the woman's face and body. The lover carries multiple selves inside of her, one of them a muscular, furry, aggressive man whose body hers (the lover's) sometimes resembles in bed.

A series of interconnected vignettes and characters explores themes of race, incarceration, family, heartbreak, and love.

After a man's long term girlfriend confesses her submissive sexual fantasies, the couple goes to see a dominatrix together. The man becomes worried as his sexual incompatibility with his wife becomes evident.

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.

When a young Black woman shows up at her crazy dead aunt's apartment in New York City with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, she finds none of the money she'd been hoping to inherit. Instead, in a hidden treasure chest, they discover a dead body, a shotgun, and a machete, sealed with a tempting offer from the Devil. The couple takes the deal and, hungry for blood, sets off to wreak havoc on the blue suits that have violently policed their communities for so long.