A middle aged upper class woman and her family live in an upscale neighborhood. The family's laughter turns malicious when they cannot distinguish between what is comical and what is horrendous and increasingly find amusement at the expense of others.

Cutthroat department politics leave a young English professor in danger of losing his job and falling into obscurity. To save himself, he seizes on a playful lie that soon spirals far out of his control.

A Jewish communist quit working at an editorial bureau where his co-workers are bothered by his leftist ideology because of his boss' praises of him.

A woman returns home to her family having just slept with another man. At dinner, her son gets into an argument with his father about their privilege. As the narrative moves back to the time they spent abroad in Nigeria, Burma and Ecuador, fractures in the family life are revealed.

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.

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.

In 1960s Boston, a Jewish deli owner who struggles to come up with his newest joke stumbles into a scam with more ramifications than he could have ever dreamed possible.

A middle-aged tax consultant who is dissatisfied with life has a night that begins with a wrong address and ends in a liquor-fueled spoken-word poetry party.

A writer finds himself entangled in the lives of his college friends, an ex-literature professor and his wife, decades after they graduate. They pursue love and their literary dreams mind a chaotic New York City of the 1960s.

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.