An overweight journalist navigates a strange friendship with a legendary writer and finds his life curiously entwined with one of the writer's students, a fiery young girl.

A Russian man recalls the first time he fell in love.

Asked by his therapist to tell a fable, a man recounts his unenchanting life as a lawyer married to a depressed, drug-abusing woman, with a disabled son he's struggling to raise. By filling his unremarkable story with sorceresses, magic, and true love, he attempts to romanticize a life he's desperate to escape.

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.

Eddie Livaudais comes home from four days in the swamp to a livid wife and consoling friends, having failed to find his son who disappeared within it.

When a woman’s husband accepts his army commission for World War II, the woman can only watch with despair as her husband's battalion joins the ranks of those expected to perish in war.

A country doctor has been treating a dying woman for a while. However, as she dies, the doctor realizes how pointless everything is.

After a death in the family, a son travels with his father to his rural Mexican hometown to settle the estate. The town is littered with all the abandoned houses, roads, and people left behind that didn't migrate to big cities; a fate which his father fears will be his if he does not immigrate to California like his brother.