A Boston-based publicist believes that he has found the next hit novel and signs a deal with the author. Later, he feels betrayed upon learning that the true author of the book is less than human.

A mundane married couple vacations at a tropical resort, where the husband becomes increasingly curious about a strange mother and son duo.

A young boy lives with his parents, former Libyan aristocrats exiles, in Cairo. Before, during, and after his mother's death he finds comfort in Naima, the family's maid with whom he shares a closer relationship than he does with his parents.

A man attempting to write a book on the Iraq war has flashbacks of violence from his time with a group of marines he accompanied as a journalist. The book centers around a man who is a stand-in for himself, who later tells his stories to an Israeli business man who is actually an intelligence agent in a bar in Frankfurt.

Amidst the Wyoming dust bowl and Great Depression, the son of an overprotective mother leaves to explore the world. However, when he returns injured and scarred, rumors spread that end in tragedy for the boy.

In the 1960s, a old woman, her son, and her daughter-in-law host guests for Sunday lunch. The woman thinks she has kept the nuclear shelter beneath the house secret from her son, with whom she has a strained relationship. However, her son knows and has installed a back way in, such that he can surprise her there after she locks herself inside.

Shortly before WWII, a young girl grows up on the grounds of a mental asylum where her father is Chief of Psychiatry. She experiences sexual assault at the hands of one of the patients who her father has become taken with.

A fat cowgirl who works on her father's ranch discovers a sentient, broken-down tractor, who begs her to revive him. After she forgets about the tractor and finally finds love, the tractor becomes the center of a terrible tragedy on the farm.

In the 70s, a depressed, overweight, insecure, intellectual teenage girl stays for two weeks with a wealthy family her mother sews clothes for, the members of whom she considers confident and beautiful. She visits the historic house of her favorite novelist and entertains sexual fantasies about the boys. Years later, after becoming an academic, she reflects on the dynamics of gender and power.

A southern Nigerian woman lives through the colonial invasion of white Europeans, losing her son to assimilation and indoctrination that leads him to view her and her culture as savages. Decades later, her granddaughter, a historian, seeks to reclaim her past.