A husband and wife have a bizarre conversation as they grapple with the reality of leaving each other.

As the end of the world approaches a wealthy artists’ community, a long-married couple stays with their friends and attends nihilistic, indulgent suicide parties.

A deceased man’s friends and coworkers try to come up with the best way to mourn him and comfort his widow, even though it seems like she doesn’t need it.

A recently widowed woman lets a man into her house to look at her fuse box — but soon realizes that the man did not come for the fuse box at all.

A young gay man attends the wedding of an ex-hookup, and suspects the ex has a fetish for Koreans.

A businesswoman has her daughter edit her report for the next day because even though she’s eleven, she “excelled at things like that.” In the morning, the business meeting is cancelled because of a sexual assault investigation. The man accused is someone the businesswoman used to sleep with. Thinking of that makes her think of another man she used to sleep with, the numerous affairs she’s had. She “enjoyed the feeling of different lovers, the newness of strangers.” While she’s waiting for the interview, she checks on her daughters. She thinks about how they “were mystified by her English. It was one thing about her that seemed to both entertain and perturb them. They deployed her expressions to taunt her and the world at large. ‘I have eaten more salt than you have eaten rice,’ they shouted at each other, at their dolls, at strangers on the street.” Her affair with the guy who’s being investigated had lasted three months. “[T]hey agreed…on the importance of seeking out risk and pleasure, and the joy of a temporary room with its own evolving rules.” She thinks about the other man she used to sleep with, how “[h]e was the lover she never would have turned away from.” But this guy, the guy who was her superior in the company, it seems she was not the only one who slept with him. Some of her female co-workers seemed affected by him too. And yet, he’d vouched for the businesswoman, even before their “brief affair, John had lauded her. He had argued for her to be further promoted, which would have meant a better salary, an easing of financial burdens, a three-bedroom apartment for the family, but she had been left to twist in the same position for ten years. Despite her tireless efforts, Lu had stayed near the bottom of the ladder.” The investigator tries to get her to blame the guy, but the businesswoman wonders, “Who was it who demanded shame? Fourteen years at the company. Where had all that time gone? Was John Sadler responsible for that?” She decides not to divulge anything. The man who’s being investigated calls her to apologize. She wonders what it means to be a mother, to be responsible for others when you want to be free. She looks at the questionnaire the investigator gave her. She tries to figure out how to answer it. Starts by writing, “I saw other woman grieving,” deletes that and then writes, “I never grieved.” She then writes in Cantonese, tries to answer why she had an affair. She thinks about having her daughter answer the questionnaire for her, but figures “[i]t was out of the question to ask the child. Was this something, after all, that a mother should do?” She ultimately writes, “Two people had an affair. Nothing more. But also nothing less.” The man who’s being investigated gets hospitalized. Nobody knows why. “Some people in the company pitied him, others didn’t.” His position gets filled by someone else. Life goes on. The businesswoman wants to tell her daughters that, that “[y]ou wanted to change [life] but it changed you, remodelled you for every age. One day, you were an immigrant, loaded down with inexplicable shame; the next you were middle-aged, a mother, and all the risks you’d taken—to live freely, to not be subdued—also made you feel ashamed, as if you’d done nothing but kick the tangerines around.” She realizes she may never understand how the world works. “She’d eaten from the bowl and turned it over; she had been unfaithful and yet faithful, wrong and yet right, lonely and yet beloved, and that was the bitter, that was the sweet quandry of it all.”

A writer receiving feedback from a professor on their drafts is sure that the person on the other end is a man. They wrestle with their own hidden identities until the end of their literary relationship comes with an unexpected revelation.

After struggling to appeal to their state governor, a dysfunctional family anxiously awaits the public execution of a relative. As they wait at home new of the execution, tensions and strife erupt in a dispute over the relative's innocence.

Amongst problems with her ungrateful children and ex-husband, a middle-aged mother deals with a burgeoning mid-life crisis — until she realizes that she has become miraculously pregnant.

When Harold's wife dies, seemingly by malicious cause, he becomes the prime suspect. As the public defender investigates her death, he finds that she may have held secrets herself.