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

In contemporary times, a fifteen-year-old creative writing whiz is sent to a gifted creatives summer camp in Massachusetts, where he meets a young male trombonist. As the two become friends and the writer gets to know the trombonist’s family and their troubles, he turns the trombonist and his dying sister into novel characters. Everything changes when the trombonist discovers the writer’s manuscript.

After her son dies, a mother reckons with the grandson he left behind.

In a world where mushrooms feed on creativity, an under-appreciated artist undergoes a risky operation to replace his dying inner voice. But when the first transplant fails, he must find another donor, or risk being banished from society forever.

In a futuristic world where the outdoors is clouded in an impenetrable darkness, a group of school children learn about mathematically engineered images that kill those who look upon them. They discover the strange darkness is due to biochips in their brains, designed to protect them from terrorist displays of these images.

On the eve of her students' elementary school graduation, a teacher in rural Ireland makes one last push to prepare her students for the real world.

At a mundane dinner party, adults dance the night away while two ten-year-olds hide and explore their bodies together.

An aspiring poet who hones his craft through hard practice experiences an unexpected setback when his younger cousin undermines his belief that skilled art-making requires time and effort.

A little girl navigates her relationships with two boys in her elementary school class, a brash bully and a shy victim, and learns about the nature of suffering.

After they have been removed from their parents and send to a camp to be brainwashed, two girls connect over an act of institutional rebellion. One suffers for it, and one goes on to live her life as she is supposed to—but will she be satisfied with leaving things alone?