When an uncle's last-chance marriage brings a mysterious girl into a Russian-Canadian teenage boy's life, their burgeoning relationship upends his social standing and threatens to tear his family apart.

A thirty-year-old woman is given the chance to travel back in time and change the fate of a bullied nine-year-old girl —possibly the nine year old version of herself.

When a Chinese immigrant mother loses her sixteen-year-old daughter to a car crash in the U.S., she and her husband illegally look for a surrogate back in China in order to have a second chance at parenthood.

When a Croatian immigrant arrives for his first day at a New York City pork processing plant, the dehumanization of his work and the petty squabbles of his colleagues become overwhelming. Even so, nothing could have prepared him for the ferocity with which their dissatisfaction soon erupts into violence.

A man's birthday gift to his flamboyantly Russian Jewish father-in-law elicits both an unexpected reaction and a series of colorful, revelatory anecdotes.