Two men putting on a production for their New York theater company seek out a legendary, elderly actor, but upon finding him, they meet a man as dilapidated as the theater he once worked for.

Though most of a prep school's students are away for the long weekend, a few boys stay behind at the dorms and are invited to dinner with a wealthy boy and his stepmother. At the dinner, the stepmother's attitude and appearance are just as alluring as the food, but the wealthy student acts strange and detached the whole evening.

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.

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,

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

Searching for a muse to inspire a novel he is attempting to write, an author in San Francisco finds his passions ignited by something much more sinister.

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.

An overweight journalist navigates a strange friendship with a legendary writer and finds his life curiously entwined with one of the writer's students, a fiery young girl.

After the suicide of his elderly and famous brother, an auto parts salesman recounts his brother's life and details his willingness to hurt everyone who loved him in the name of art.

When a mysterious new member joins a group of struggling authors, the friends discover that they may have a supernatural creature in their midst, who can grant a single author success above all the others—but at a cost.