Trying to escape his Jewish past with the Holocaust, Luchinski is a Polish man who serves as a UN diplomat to an African country. He encounters people who and experiences that encourage him come to terms with his identity and past, but shows little signs of change.

A tourist from England complains about his boring trip to California but enjoys experiences around town facilitated by his zany friends.

A researcher and his assistant conduct neuropsychological experiments on dogs with the understanding that the dogs will be terminated immediately after, but the reality of their killing is much more difficult to cope with.

In a small town in South Carolina, a middle-aged man is dragged into being the referee for a $1000 grudge match between his eccentric friend and a town outsider.

Having escaped internment, a Japanese man happens upon a confederacy of Natives and ingratiates himself in the culture and tradition of clockwork.

A store owner in Minneapolis tries to live his life as a good man, but when he's killed during a robbery, he comes to learn how spiteful God really is.

A father and son play an especially strategic and emotionally intense game of tennis that ends in both their losses, in one way or another.

A professor tries to convey to his students the magnitude of the most perfectly crafted poem ever written in the English language: “Lycidas.”