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

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

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

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 Los Angeles speech pathologist is assigned to the case of a presumably mentally-ill woman who speaks in gibberish that turns out to be Old English. When the woman disappears, deciphering her mysterious writing leads the pathologist to wonder if she has stumbled across a time traveler.

When a serial writer decides that he can’t take more of his monotonous life, he destroys his copywriter and leaves his domestic prison to protest the rise of the machines.

After struggling to appeal to their state governor, a dysfunctional family anxiously awaits the public execution of a relative. As they wait at home new of the execution, tensions and strife erupt in a dispute over the relative's innocence.

A young couple obsessed with syntax sets off to meet their favorite author.

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.

A woman on a grand jury hears the case of an older woman who was brutally raped by one of her former students. She attempts to understand the different ways the story disturbs her.