As an old woman revisits her family's quintessentially American history, she finds a way to respect and love her parents, despite the scandals and tragedies they endured.

A man reflects on his time as a newspaper boy during World War I. Overwhelmed by the horror of the headlines, he must confront harsh truths about morality during wartime.

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.

After having a disturbing nightmare concerning his family, an elderly veteran in 1910's Virginia buys a packet of fire grenades to ward off approaching harm.

In a series of commentaries on the human condition — life, truth, happiness, death — a spinster sister takes in her dead sister’s children; a man is entranced by the endless waves which roll and crash in the ocean; a carpenter wrestles with the burden of being everyone’s confidante; a dying railroad crossing watchman shares a simple but complex wisdom.

During a violent snowstorm in Iowa, a train carrying a traveling salesman, a railroad worker, and a family of five takes a desperate detour to Carthage. When the passengers arrive, the station is a mess and the agent is dead, but they must work together to welcome a new life amidst the deathly circumstances.

After fleeing Germany in the wake of World War II, two immigrants struggle to adjust to a new life of labor and hardship on an American farm.

After being offered a 100,000 pound advance to write a book on the twentieth century, a historian/writer struggling with depression takes to London to begin this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

When quiet academic Mr. Palmer involves himself with a group of mothers waiting daily for news from husbands and lovers fighting in Japan, he realizes his Grecian impression of the solemn waiting women is far from the reality of their bristling enmity.

On an island off the coast of South Carolina, two men quickly find themselves plagued by a mysterious spirit after one of them steals a flask from an African American man’s grave.