California has seceded from America, and Molly and her daughter Phoebe run a bookstore that straddles the troubled border of the two countries. When outright war breaks out, Molly and Phoebe must protect their customers - American and Californian alike - but the customers are not all willing to get along.

Passive and easily satisfied, Roger spends his days managing his secondhand bookstore The Pleiade. He worships modernist classics without fully reading them, he’s gregarious but seldom invited to dinner, and he types novel after novel methodically, but all are rejected. He passes seasons of love and loss in unfailing, impassive routine.

A Black foster teenager looks for escape from his life through books he borrows at a library. A witch-librarian guides his selections along the way, and ultimately gives him an off-limits book to help him literally escape the world.

A woman embarks on a treacherous, snowy journey to help her friend.

A woman, living with her husband, is overcome with a strange, inexplicable ailment to her body.

A daughter, on the verge of becoming a mother, learns a great deal in spending time with her own mother.

A mother, her two children, and their stepfather come over to a friend’s for a dinner on Labor Day.

At the root of her complicated family formed by her father and stepmother, a girl faces years of abuse through what they consider to be a “royal beating.”