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

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 man walks with a writer around London who tells him about the novel he wrote that was lost which can never be matched in beauty by any other.

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.

A writer arrives at an eerie residency near a lake where she camped with her Girl Scout troop as a child. The writer revisits a past trauma at the hands of the other Girl Scouts and comes to conclusions about what it is to reside in one's own mind. Along the way, she navigates a mysterious illness, a fellow resident whose identity and words are impossible to remember, and the appearance of a severed rabbit on her doorstep.

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

A rambunctious teenager with an inquisitive mind causes much grief for all his New England family and neighbors when he visits them in the summer of 1914, on the eve of World War I.

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.

Alyse, a part-time writer, is unable to excavate any interest from her seemingly boring family, utterly unaware of the deeply complex and exciting adventures her brother, sister, and aunt often have