A Canadian graduate student and his wife are living in France and often socialize with their peers at concerts and dinner parties. They soon make friends with an established novelist, but as the student continues to meet people he begins to question who he can trust and who his real friends are.

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

Having sacrificed his dream job to financially support his marriage, a man realizes there is sexual tension between his wife and his friend. Ultimately, he makes tough decisions about both his friendship and his marriage.

Upon returning to Paris after a decade-long hiatus wandering the French countryside and writing an epic, a poet encounters an enigmatic young woman who believes he is a god and wants to be his disciple,

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.

A father facing mental and physical debilitations has his sights set on capturing a drop of sunlight to bring joy to everyone in his small hometown. Despite his good deed, the town finds it necessary to deliberate: is this man an alcoholic, mentally ill, or a criminal?

A middle-aged man and his wife struggle to keep up with their teenage daughter who they just adopted six months ago, especially when she takes interest in a boy her age.

A Jewish mother wants her daughter to marry well and have a better life, but her husband doesn't seem to care. After her other daughter passes away, she realizes she should not hesitate to make bigger sacrifices.

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 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.