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 writer uses his relationship with a mysterious woman as inspiration for his magical realism story. But, things go awry when he begins to question their compatibility.

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

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 man's lonely life focused on the pursuit of reason and music leaves him questioning what more there may be in the lives of other people and of religion.

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.

A Hemingway scholar is convinced by a conman to forge a Hemingway story in order to get millions of dollars in a plot that may disrupt the omniverse, even as the famed author steps in to intervene.

In Michigan, a recently divorced professor reflects on what it means to exist, first alone in his empty apartment and then alongside his student in a mission to find a missing girl.

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