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

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.

An unassuming attendee of Gertrude Stein’s famed Paris salon reflects on his time as a writer. Twenty years after Stein’s passing, he realizes the profound truths of her life, art, and legacy.

A writer for the ’60s most famed and experimental television series watches the shows phantasmic creator choose between recluse genius and a quaint life of normalcy. Faced with stubborn alcoholism, a hit television series resemblant of the twilight zone, and a tree stump with questionably magical properties, the narrator watches cinematic wunderkind David Findley toe the line between brilliance and delusion.

Ruthie, an experienced writer, reflects on the scholarship opportunity that set her career in motion.

A professor tries to convey to his students the magnitude of the most perfectly crafted poem ever written in the English language: “Lycidas.”

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 Boston-based publicist believes that he has found the next hit novel and signs a deal with the author. Later, he feels betrayed upon learning that the true author of the book is less than human.

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