In a small university town in the 1960s, a mysterious couple moves into the attic and keeps to themselves, leaving the neighbors to wonder what goes on behind closed doors. Through gossip and rumors, the neighbors witness the slow unraveling of Mr. Markham's life.

In a Priory community by a yellow lake, a young man works for his mother's acquaintance to build the basement of her beach house. He is pushed to complete the project before the community summer solstice celebration, though the celebration turns out to be a rather cheerless, mundane success without necessitating the finished basement anyway.

An unnamed narrator muses about the layout and the mundane emptiness at a neighborhood intersection. A man later gets out of a streetcar at the intersection and enters one of the brick buildings.

In intense discussion a group leader ponders aloud, asking why hermits hide and what defines outcasts, among other cerebral queries. A group of friends discusses the oddities they have seen and perceived in their lives leather-clad hermits and criminal astronauts among them. They debate the purpose of hermitage, the classification of outcasts, and the purpose of their own reflections.

A weary businessman changes his worldview when he strikes up an unusual friendship with a vagrant living atop a skyscraper.

In a society where everyone is masked and takes on a new personality every day, an underground network seeks to return to their original identities.

A Hollywood film production in a small rural town threatens to destroy everything a young, scrappy local kid knows about his life.

Six days after getting married, a man discovers that his wife has stolen money from their family and friends, leading him to reflect on many other strange behaviors of hers. He ultimately decides that he will stay and spend his life taking the blame for her and smoothing over her mistakes.

A lonely old man comes to visit a married woman's apartment, which she and her husband are renting out for the summer while they travel to Europe—however, the woman becomes suspicious that the old man is not actually interested in renting at all.

After moving into a new neighborhood in Great Neck, New York, a man and his family experience nothing but the worst luck after befriending the unbelievably perfect Klausner family.