Stinging from his recently cut-off engagement, a young man retreats to a small town in the mountains of Virginia to work as city editor of the local newspaper. Alternately entranced and disgusted with his hermit-like nocturnal life, he finds peace and pleasure listening to the St. Anthony Chorale.

A man walks with a writer around London who tells him about the novel he wrote that was lost which can never be matched in beauty by any other.

A creative writing teacher sits through a conference with one his favorite students. He takes us on a journey through the characters in the story, and in his life.

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

A writer is shocked when his retired father begins to publish stories. The man struggles to admit that his father is a talented writer, especially since the stories are based on events from the man's childhood.

A writer struggles to craft a story and begins to lose his own sanity when an idea finally comes to him.

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.

In contemporary times, a fifteen-year-old creative writing whiz is sent to a gifted creatives summer camp in Massachusetts, where he meets a young male trombonist. As the two become friends and the writer gets to know the trombonist’s family and their troubles, he turns the trombonist and his dying sister into novel characters. Everything changes when the trombonist discovers the writer’s manuscript.

After spending his adult life under the shadow of his father, a former NSA whistleblower, a man comes to terms with his complicated family history and what he wants for his own future.

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.