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 Latvian man who immigrated to Los Angeles as a boy must travel back to his homeland to ensure that his grandfather receives his new gravestone after the stonecutter his family was corresponding with dies.

In the early-twentieth-century South, a black teenager discovers she has a magical power. But when race and gender-related violence violate her existence, she must decide whether to use her power to protect the people she loves or to harm the people who hate.

An unnamed narrator muses about the layout and the mundane emptiness at a neighborhood intersection. A man later gets out of a streetcar at the intersection and enters one of the brick buildings.

A reverend is missing and his fiance along with his friend are looking for him and the reason he disappeared. A reverend's fiance and friend are worried about his disappearance, especially after he has seemed to take an interest in science more than religion.

When a dying Englishman forcefully relocates his family to France for his final resting place, their family falls into disruption during the long years of his unexpected remission.