A young couple obsessed with syntax sets off to meet their favorite author.

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

When a writer and her old writing professor reconvene in a Mexican restaurant one final time before the professor's death, they experience a night of unwanted encounters and unnecessary criticism that leaves the writer with a bitter taste in her mouth.

A disenchanted couple moves from the country to the city. As they engage with an inside joke that once kept them closely together, it incites an exasperated conversation about long-accumulated problems.

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.

In an unlikely encounter, a homeless teenage boy recounts harsh events of his life to a writer. He nonchalantly tells of an employer whose assignments caused him to have permanent physical and mental damage.

Two young individuals on their honeymoon stop at a gas station in an Indian reservation to buy souvenirs and eat lunch. To the great embarrassment of his wife, the husband spends the entirety of their stop mocking the Native Americans who live there.

A young man invites a tourist to his favorite London café and recounts the strangest affair he’d ever had with a woman he picked up there; a woman who challenged and changed him. A young, beguiling man picks a tourist out of a group and invites him to see the real sites of London, not the tired and disappointing spectacles. He takes the tourist to the Café de Paris, an old but grand establishment with the promise of dancing and young ladies. The man admonishes his companion to loosen up, stay and drink, and while they wait for the evening to unfold the man begins a story.

A Canadian graduate student and his wife are living in France and often socialize with their peers at concerts and dinner parties. They soon make friends with an established novelist, but as the student continues to meet people he begins to question who he can trust and who his real friends are.

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.