In the depths of his mind, a writer tries to uncover the autonomous, nefarious motivations of his own characters.

A man walks with a writer around London who tells him about the novel he wrote that was lost which can never be matched in beauty by any other.

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.

Caught between two dimensions of spacetime, a poet shares stories with two women in need of his narrative insight, all the while meditating on the meaning of stories and the intricacies of interpersonal connection.

A young girl works to impress her highly critical parents and submits to a terrible fate as she struggles to meet their impossible standards.

When a notebook full of top-secret designs is looted from a Brooklyn saloon, a Latino drummer and his inventor girlfriend must go on a quest to retrieve it from a rival Manhattan gang.

In California, a young woman reflects on her relationship to her father while working on a novel. Through reading her father’s novel, she understands their relationship through his eyes.

A son tells a series of stories, most of them about his father and stepfather. As the son describes a robbery that took place at his house in high school and his experiences with his father, a former Jehovah's Witness and current alcoholic, he begins to recall details from his childhood.

A daughter and a mother wonder what the lesson of their story is.

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