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.

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.

Passive and easily satisfied, Roger spends his days managing his secondhand bookstore The Pleiade. He worships modernist classics without fully reading them, he’s gregarious but seldom invited to dinner, and he types novel after novel methodically, but all are rejected. He passes seasons of love and loss in unfailing, impassive routine.

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.

A progressive and bitter father going through a mid-life crisis goes on holiday to a water park with his wife and excitable son. He casually confronts racist and irritable guests while trying to figure out how to be a good dad.

In Bulgaria, two men who met online play submissive and dominant roles in an innitially-consensual sexual encounter that turns into a violent assault.

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

A writer summers with his mistress and part of her family. The group runs into one of his former students, and they all smoke together.

Searching for a muse to inspire a novel he is attempting to write, an author in San Francisco finds his passions ignited by something much more sinister.