In a small American village, anticipation builds for an annual event dubbed "The Lottery," where villagers select a member of the community at random to suffer an irrational and inhumane fate.

When a mysterious orange ball rolls through town, everybody does their best to ignore, but when curious children get a hold of it – the town spirals into sickness. Soon enough, all the town’s children have turned into the same orange ball that infected them, and the town struggles to find itself again.

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.

A schoolboard debates the merits of history—and how to remember it.

A New Yorker attends a meeting for unemployed workers and the sleazy speakers leave him skeptical about his job prospects.

A city employs people to act strangely to order to make others feel normal.

In a futuristic society in which free speech is illegal without a license, a man works to get his license by having strange and touching conversations with a bizarre cast of characters.

While experiencing a midlife crisis, a respectable man must choose between his wife and his commitment to an eccentric political party.

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.

A white reverend has given up a considerable amount of his good life to support a Black political campaign.