A group of working class people run a dangerous path toward a promised Elysium, and those who survive are rewarded with nothing they can appreciate or comprehend.

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 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.

In upstate New York, a journalist reflects on his complex relationships with a local politician and businessman, his children, and the wife who murdered him.

Protagonist Leo Gold attends the annual Anarchists’ Convention in New York City, a spectacle predictably filled with divisions and subcommittees and impassioned debates over topics as banal as the order of events and whether dinner should be self-serve. But when the hotel manager asks the party to vacate the room as previously booked, the group unites to build barricades and sing protest songs to defend their noble cause.

Al Roosten, a local business owner always second-best to his competitor, Larry Donfrey, contemplates returning to an anti-drug charity event to ensure that Donfrey is able to help his disabled daughter.

A graduate student finds himself embroiled in a strange sort of psychological game after he agrees to write a paper for another well-off student.

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.

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.

In France, an extremely wealthy man who owns a porcelain collection is invited to lunch by an odd-ball art dealer who has an elderly, eccentric socialite friend that collects porcelain de sax.