A conversation in a shopping mall ends with a call to security.

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.

California has seceded from America, and Molly and her daughter Phoebe run a bookstore that straddles the troubled border of the two countries. When outright war breaks out, Molly and Phoebe must protect their customers - American and Californian alike - but the customers are not all willing to get along.

In the near future, America has been seized by a totalitarian regime. While hiding out from fascist gangs, a young, queer, Jewish woman in Kansas City writes notes in an encyclopedia of imaginary places, hoping the book will live on to tell her story.

A woman works retail and worries about how to make it as an actress in LA. To remedy her social and financial problems, she bonds with a teenage co-worker and dabbles in sex work, despite her nagging concerns.

A former book thief works with an organized crime group to steal back an Atlas which has the ability to correspond with Hell.

When a librarian finds a moving book of poetry among a donation, she is introduced to fellow lovers of the author's work who strive to preserve the poet's desire for privacy while commemorating her work.

In modern-day Texas, a teenage boy navigates a world in which teens can take out virtual loans on a whim, big corporations sponsor everything from housing to church services, and consumerism runs rampant. As high school graduation approaches, he grows apart from his girlfriend and family — and becomes increasingly attached to an unsponsored, unbranded, humble little church.

In the 70s, a depressed, overweight, insecure, intellectual teenage girl stays for two weeks with a wealthy family her mother sews clothes for, the members of whom she considers confident and beautiful. She visits the historic house of her favorite novelist and entertains sexual fantasies about the boys. Years later, after becoming an academic, she reflects on the dynamics of gender and power.

In an alternate Great Depressions NYC, a Jewish foreman investigates the true outputs of his factory as his eccentric German employer seeks to use an emerging idea called "industrivism," or the improvement of the human body through technology, created by a bored pulp writer, to recruit workers to fulfill his machinations. Without realizing, a pulp writer in an alternative 1920s New York City invents the idea of "industrivism" that earns her an audience with an eccentric German businessman. Meanwhile, a Jewish foreman investigate the true purpose of the factory and unearths his employer's dark past and future machinations.