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.

After the death of her father, a teen girl learns to navigate family demands and her own personal desires as she grows up and pursues an education.

A high school boy makes a habit of stealing cars, picking up girls, and skipping school. When he begins to worry that he is getting into too much trouble, the boy must decide whether to seek help or continue his criminal lifestyle.

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

A senior in high school realizes she is in love with an acquaintance within weeks of graduating, and she tries to initiate something before they both leave for college.

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 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.

In contemporary times, a fifteen-year-old creative writing whiz is sent to a gifted creatives summer camp in Massachusetts, where he meets a young male trombonist. As the two become friends and the writer gets to know the trombonist’s family and their troubles, he turns the trombonist and his dying sister into novel characters. Everything changes when the trombonist discovers the writer’s manuscript.

A seventh-grade English teacher copes with the recent death of her father and assigns a memoir that her students love reading. However, their parents question her for her pedagogical choices because of the swear words and provocative topics in the book.

A professor finds himself attracted to one of his students, allowing her to skip the final exams - but her resultant grade causes her to lash out at him and reveal harsh truths about his own life that he finds difficult to accept.