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

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 English professor meets his long-time writing idol, who turns out to be a surly and irritable man — nothing like the majestic intellectual the professor had envisioned.

An accomplished but ineffectual columnist searches for fulfillment, until a death in the family causes him to question the family he took for granted.

Essie, a biographer, finds out she has more in common with her subject Matthew Corley, a sleeper agent, when she recreates him as a simulated figure that can be accessed with the purchase of her book.

An insufferable white man offers advice to a well-read, unemployed Black man holding a sandwich-board sign on a street corner on race relations, physical appearance, and how to improve his handwriting and thereby advance himself in society.

A young man leaves his traditional village behind to travel and work on distant planets. Throughout his interplanetary journeys, he must constantly reevaluate his understandings of truth, tradition, and love as he seeks a fulfilling life of his own, independent of what is expected from him.

A depressed, middle-aged San Francisco writer gives his artificially intelligent alter ego permission to assume his personality in public, resulting in an unexpected boom for the washed-up man.

After a university student returns home from to Mali to find al-Qaeda has thrown his hometown into a state of chaos and destruction, he finds himself lost in the desert, with an unpredictable technology age genie emerging from his iPad to guide him to safety.

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.