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.

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

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.

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,

A young writer attends a writer's workshop where she begins a relationship with an author whose books she loves. But after they move in together, she finds that his life begins to suffuse every aspect of hers.

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.

An American writer travels to Sophia where he meets a famous poetess. He falls in love with her and her attitude.

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.

A Canadian graduate student and his wife are living in France and often socialize with their peers at concerts and dinner parties. They soon make friends with an established novelist, but as the student continues to meet people he begins to question who he can trust and who his real friends are.

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