A catalog of the tools different alien species use to read and write, leading to fundamental questions about what it means to make patterns of knowledge against the noise of the universe.

A writing critic reviews the construction of Charles Chesnutt’s stories and how to write surfiction.

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.

When a serial writer decides that he can’t take more of his monotonous life, he destroys his copywriter and leaves his domestic prison to protest the rise of the machines.

A young couple obsessed with syntax sets off to meet their favorite author.

A minorly successful writer allows his insecurities to drive him to dramatic actions.

A lonely high school English teacher develops a crush on one of his students, who continually writes him notes about the books she reads and calls him out of the blue. When her family invites him over for dinner to celebrate her admission to Princeton, he is caught off guard when they announce they want him to marry her.

A college student's somewhat pathetic alcoholic uncle regales him and his mother with a tale of how a famous skywriter meddled with his life and love.

An accomplished but ineffectual columnist searches for fulfillment, until a death in the family causes him to question the family he took for granted.

A stubborn and grumpy letter writer is detained in a palace for the crimes of his so-called brother during the Iranian Revolution.