In 1950s New York, a world-renowned female pianist develops a mysterious condition that leaves her unable to play. Forced to confront her unhappiness, she decides to rent a studio at Carnegie Hall to sort out her failing marriage and career.

A man recounts his life experience in New York, covering the various people near and dear to him, as well as the growth of the city itself.

A piano player recounts the various women he fell devastatingly in love with, breaking his heart and making the city in which he lives unbearable.

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.

When a New York woman learns that her assistant’s husband cut his middle finger off during a fight, she can’t help but dwell on her assistant’s luck with men and her own inferiority.

When a teenage girl in 1940s New York City finally conjures up the urge to demand some money that a friend owes her, she’s treated to an afternoon of conversation unlike anything she’s ever heard before.

When a pianist loses her ability to play, she retreats to the run-down apartment building above Carnegie Hall.

The prideful uncle of a child piano prodigy pushes the girl to the detriment of her craft. A veteran musician warns him of the future that lies ahead.

Two men putting on a production for their New York theater company seek out a legendary, elderly actor, but upon finding him, they meet a man as dilapidated as the theater he once worked for.

Drawing from Almeda Roth’s 1873 poetry collection Offerings and Roth’s town newspaper the Vidette, an unnamed researcher guides the reader through a rich biography of Roth’s personal affairs, love interest, and ultimate death.