A seventh-grade English teacher copes with the recent death of her father and assigns a memoir that her students love reading. However, their parents question her for her pedagogical choices because of the swear words and provocative topics in the book.

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.

A young man recently dumped by his boyfriend finds both solace and conviction in memories of his past and an unusual romantic memoir from the 1950s. But the more he delves into the book and his memories, the greater his feelings of pain and regret.

A young boy living with his aunt and uncle, who are immigrants from Russia, watches as his family slips into poverty during the Great Depression.

After getting dumped by her best friend, a woman stays home alone on Halloween to find solace in the writing of an 18th-century naturalist.

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.

A young girl feels under-appreciated and left out during a family trip to Italy when her older sister and their college-age babysitter engage in a romantic affair.

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.

An old woman visits the small town where she was once a waitress and remembers how she dated a wealthy college student and built a strong relationship with his intelligent mother. After realizing she didn't want to marry him, she shared a spontaneous, emotionally-intimate drive with his troubled older half-brother, who died by suicide just after.