An interstate road traveled by African souls is both filled with welcoming bazaar-style market stalls and dark, suspicious areas that most travelers and sellers avoid.

A large factory is shut down in a small town in Illinois, and the town's residents face a sudden economic depression — until a prison is built where the factory had been, invigorating the economy but bringing along with it unintended consequences.

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.

Two cartographers reach a geographic boundary and discuss what they see.

In a village in Pakistan, a corrupt electrician makes a living by slowing down electricity meters. As he grows wealthier, he becomes a target for robbery himself.

A tiny Chinese village is slated to be inundated by a flood, and the government offers resettlement checks and industrialized homes to citizens who relocate so that a dam can be built in the village’s place. A seed keeper and schoolteacher are among the last to stay behind.

In a town so small it can hardly be called a town, a black woman serves a rich white family until a series of horrific events causes the single joy in her life to vanish.

As the era of American farming comes to an end, it proves more difficult than expected for one young man to convince an old woman that she should leave the land for more fruitful prospects.

When a northern writer arrives in a rural Tennessee town to better understand the culture for his novel, he is put through a harrowing night by the menfolk who, in the course of an elaborate joke, convince him he has inadvertently killed the son of his hosts.

In a small university town in the 1960s, a mysterious couple moves into the attic and keeps to themselves, leaving the neighbors to wonder what goes on behind closed doors. Through gossip and rumors, the neighbors witness the slow unraveling of Mr. Markham's life.