Cutthroat department politics leave a young English professor in danger of losing his job and falling into obscurity. To save himself, he seizes on a playful lie that soon spirals far out of his control.

When a Soviet state official attempts to coerce a celebrated poet into apologizing for a political joke he made, the official gets a taste of his own predatory medicine at the hand of the poet's vengeful wife.

A burned-out State Department official takes a job at what he thinks is a new, Black-only civilization, only to discover a horrifying case of wholesale cannibalism.

When an accountant's flight is delayed due to intense fog, he and the other waiting passengers experience a series of strange occurrences, from meteors to a Cuban uprising.

In communist Ukraine, a canning engineer reports a heating problem in his apartment to his local city hall—only to learn that his building doesn’t exist in the city registry. He takes drastic measures to restore heating to his apartment.

A man who is chronically late in a society where lateness is fatal takes up an alter ego that seeks to convince people that you shouldn't be a slave to your schedule.

A middle-aged tax consultant who is dissatisfied with life has a night that begins with a wrong address and ends in a liquor-fueled spoken-word poetry party.

A nameless person, implied to be Donald Trump, reflects on how he has everything he wants but no artistic ability. He has heard that the most famous dictators of the world were all failed artists, and compares that to his own sense of shame at his lack of artistic talent.

Protagonist Leo Gold attends the annual Anarchists’ Convention in New York City, a spectacle predictably filled with divisions and subcommittees and impassioned debates over topics as banal as the order of events and whether dinner should be self-serve. But when the hotel manager asks the party to vacate the room as previously booked, the group unites to build barricades and sing protest songs to defend their noble cause.

A government official in futuristic all-powerful Communist Vietnam accidentally takes drugs which counteract the drugs poisoning the public water. With his cleared senses, he sees that the Party Leader is not human or machine, but God.