A writer struggles to craft a story and begins to lose his own sanity when an idea finally comes to him.

A man's lonely life focused on the pursuit of reason and music leaves him questioning what more there may be in the lives of other people and of religion.

A man walks with a writer around London who tells him about the novel he wrote that was lost which can never be matched in beauty by any other.

In a small town, a resident watches as the people and place change. He recounts eight seemingly disparate stories, but the town connects them all.

A man reflects on the past week while an unexpected storm rages outside, and he compares the events that follow with the fall of the Roman Empire.

Knowing that some things happen only once in a lifetime, a man walking down a street is convinced that he sees the girl of his dreams and wonders if fate is telling him to leave his wife.

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.

When a woman talks to a man in bed, their conversation reminds her of a short story she read earlier, and she wonders if she is stupid like the story's character.

After he is kicked out of his house, a husband spends his days sleeping under a flowering pear tree in the front yard, his wife hatefully observing.

After her possessions begin to disappear from her apartment, a woman suspects that her adoring new husband is not who she thought he was.