Following a messy breakup, an MIT graduate and a PhD student at Indiana University separately talk about the problems in their former relationship in two spliced-together conversations, exploring conflicts surrounding language, intimacy, commitment, and intellectualism.

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

Everything all at once in word form.

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.

A woman has an affair with a female lover who works in retouching models and imagines retouching the woman's face and body. The lover carries multiple selves inside of her, one of them a muscular, furry, aggressive man whose body hers (the lover's) sometimes resembles in bed.

A catalog of the tools different alien species use to read and write, leading to fundamental questions about what it means to make patterns of knowledge against the noise of the universe.

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.

Dermot, a being with an insatiable hunger but a controlled demeanor, works with police to find and kill predators, like himself, who are ravaging the city.

After two neighboring men’s wives leave them, they go on a fishing trip in the Bogs. The trip takes a turn for the worst with bad weather and the presence of an unwanted fisherman.

As they hide from an enemy in their house, a woman and man argue about the nature of the enemy--whether it is human or weather-related.