A first-generation college student, hours from graduating, dreads leaving school and her faculty mentor for the "real world" and her traditional, Eastern European parents.

When a young father is hired for an English instructorship position, he struggles to balance playing the role of a teacher and meeting the university’s demands for a published scholar.

A college counselor watches anxiously as her teenage son applies to college without her help. As her son plans for his future, the counselor and her husband reflect on how quickly their lives have changed, seeking ways to steady themselves in the midst of middle age.

In the year 2000, Orion is a young software developer who’s hit it big with his tech company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Despite his long-term relationship, success, and newfound riches, he feels an emptiness in his life, leading him into dangerous territory.

After a fifteen-year-old girl makes a bet with her father that after high school she will leave home to never return, her father takes her to the train station early one morning and tells her to leave. When she winds up in Los Angeles, she finds her way there, despite the fact that she does not feel free.

Ruthie, an experienced writer, reflects on the scholarship opportunity that set her career in motion.

Despite being on the verge of failing his English class, a forty-two-year old college student finds himself saving a life at his university.

When her co-worker returns pregnant and happy from a year of travel, a seventh grade English teacher reflects on her dissatisfaction with her own life and her longing for decisiveness.

When the Great Depression hits a well-to-do family, an eighteen-year-old girl works at a ranch to put herself through college, enduring the difficulty of the work while also enjoying being away from the stifling environment of her home.

A female professor at a contemporary university remembers an old conversation with a former teacher of hers, which prompts her to reconsider her job, solitude, and love of reading.