A young man and his widowed mother move to the Midwestern countryside, where the mother runs a deadly get-rich-quick scheme.

Three boys navigate their youth in Chicago, but are forced to grow up quickly when they start cooking drugs for money.

In a segregated America at the onset of World War II, strange, explosive “stumps”—formed out of spores and resembling wooden statues of the recently deceased—have begun to appear all over cities. To neutralize and remove these stumps, a new government agency has employed a group of singers whose unique vocal resonance can turn the stumps to dust. But when the only two Black female “exterminators” in Chicago—a God-fearing goody two-shoes and a brash blues singer—uncover the agency's corrupt secrets, they decide to stage a rebellion.

In a town so small it can hardly be called a town, a black woman serves a rich white family until a series of horrific events causes the single joy in her life to vanish.

A large factory is shut down in a small town in Illinois, and the town's residents face a sudden economic depression — until a prison is built where the factory had been, invigorating the economy but bringing along with it unintended consequences.

As a Chinese-American widower and professor of philosophy contemplates the life he has provided his two daughters, he recalls a traumatic memory from his youth as a delivery boy for a Chinese restaurant, riding through the dangerous streets of New York City.

An expatriate and veteran of the Jazz Age tries to regain custody of his daughter, but the ghosts of his darkly opulent lifestyle stand in the way.

When a friend from his drug-dealing past shows up unannounced, a filmographer who lives in the suburbs of Long Island must reckon with how to preserve his suburban fantasy while he tries to save his friend from their former dealer.

A couple with a rocky marriage argues over fetching a newspaper, which becomes a catalyst for their impending divorce. When they unexpectedly reunite over a decade later, the former couple witnesses how their lives disparately transformed thanks to the fateful newspaper.

After a teenage girl from a poor logging family is found dead at a college party hosted at the home of a prominent Michigan family, a detective on her case must negotiate the area’s local politics—at his own peril.