A boy visits the Ulysses County library seeking books that allow him to escape into distant worlds. As the witch-librarian chooses stories for him and senses him becoming more and more desperate, she eventually lends him a book that literally allows him to leave his world.

In a society where the top one percent rules the lower classes, a teenage girl is forced out of her home by ethnic cleansing and must turn to a wealthy man in order to survive.

When a gay writer is hit over the head and knocked out by his Slovenian friend, he finds himself aimless in New York City, unable to do anything more than read about Eastern European history, retell the same story over again, and wait for his friend to return.

After partying for the first time in a while with his childhood friend, a middle-aged father in North Carolina must reckon with the scary truth about his hangover.

As an old woman revisits her family's quintessentially American history, she finds a way to respect and love her parents, despite the scandals and tragedies they endured.

A little girl sits down by her dying grandmother’s bedside to receive an important warning about how she should live her life with the knowledge that death will come to her, too.

When a middle-aged woman goes on a hike with a man she is seeing, a mastiff attacks the man. The woman wonders whether the dog or the relationship itself is the bigger danger.

Two loners with tragic pasts in a small hunting town harbor a childhood rivalry. When one drugs another to cheat him out of a record-setting kill, the other plans his revenge.

In a wild west boardinghouse, a young woman nurses an injured miner back to health while she reflects on her past relationships with men.

A catalog of the tools different alien species use to read and write, leading to fundamental questions about what it means to make patterns of knowledge against the noise of the universe.