As the end of the world approaches a wealthy artists’ community, a long-married couple stays with their friends and attends nihilistic, indulgent suicide parties.

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 Iowa, a young violinist is asked to play at a famous poet's memorial. In the process, he gains a new perspective on who and why we grieve.

In this metafiction, the many lives of an unnamed man are scrutinized as he passes through millennia.

Finally at peace after decades of war, the telepathic people of Gaant and the people of Enith can coexist, including a Gaantish military officer and an Enithi nurse. The two had become unlikely friends after being one another's prisoners during the war; they'd bonded over chess, and can now finish their game in peace.

At the end of the world, a girl resolves to finish her English paper.

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

After the collapse of civilization, a group of men meets weekly to read classic novels and listen to records on a portable phonograph, bringing them great joy but unbearable distress at remembering how the world used to be.

A graduate student finds himself embroiled in a strange sort of psychological game after he agrees to write a paper for another well-off student.

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.