An unemployed husband learns of an affair between his wife and her boss. He writes an emotional letter to the boss that details the course of his failing marriage, and he pleads with the boss to not take his wife away from him.

When he and his fellow workers are left unemployed by the mechanization of the cotton-picking process, a man overcomes his instincts to flee, and stays with his friends as they set out to make a new life.

A professor leaves her job and her husband for her ancestral home of Newfoundland. There, she confronts depression, isolation, old friends, and old love.

In the 1980s in Summersville, West Virginia, a town with a dying coal industry and a burgeoning tourism industry, a whitewater rafting accident results in the death of a high school aged girl and her father. The tour guide responsible becomes mad with grief and obsession; a year later, when he tells a story of what really happened that day, it's unclear what's reality and what's fiction.

In Long Beach, California, a religious Chinese immigrant finds a job caring for a teenage boy suffering from leukemia. By watching M*A*S*H and reading the Bible, they find solace in one another during the last months of his life.

Three generations of men grapple with the effects of unemployment and lost hope over Thanksgiving.

An orphan-turned-salesman loses his job and resorts to bargaining off pieces of himself in an effort to appraise the value of human life.

An ex-couple spends the afternoon together catching up in a valley they used to call their own, a month after the man loses his job. He paints, and she watches birds.

A Wyoming native unsuccessfully jumps between jobs over his lifetime to support his large family. Through bankruptcy and loss, he perseveres and continues to look forward to his next venture.

As a university professor acts as a sounding board for everyone else’s problems, her own stress mounts to a dangerous peak.