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

In an eccentric take on the afterlife, a recently deceased man in his mid-20s reminisces on his life and marriage--two things he gradually learns were more complicated than he initially assumed.

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 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.

Upon returning to Paris after a decade-long hiatus wandering the French countryside and writing an epic, a poet encounters an enigmatic young woman who believes he is a god and wants to be his disciple,

When he hears of his estranged childhood friend’s death, an American writer travels to Denmark to mourn with the woman that he and his friend fought over in their youth.

A disabled, non-devout man tries to love God more than his wife who died after an angelic visitation from Heaven causes her to bleed to death.

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.

Writing a foreword, a man reflects on his relationship to a writer and said writer's wife.

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.