A man recalls his intimate friendship with his former English professor, who resolved to fuel his unsatisfied desire for playwriting during the time they were apart. In their reunion decades later, instead of the brilliant play he promised, the professor shows his former student a disturbing product of his mental instability.

An eight-year-old girl attends a family lunch with her aunt, uncles, and cousins. Family drama ensues as a baby is hidden from his grandmother, an uncle drinks too much alcohol, and children indulge in naughty conversation.

When a graduate student makes his way to Colorado with his recently unemployed girlfriend to visit his married friends, an alarming development in his friends’ marriage causes him to reevaluate his own relationship and, in the process, make a grave mistake.

When a former anti-war nudist files for divorce from his hippie-turned-middle-aged conservative wife, a figurative nuclear war fires up between the two suburban parents.

At the end of the world, a girl resolves to finish her English paper.

In a society where civilians are monitored by personality tests that surveil whether they are being perfect citizens, a 1970s high school teacher meets an over-achieving student who forces him to confront the forced boredom dominating his own life.

A young Native American man talks about his encounter with a white man who was captured by his tribe. The white man and the Native American man grow closer through mutual teaching.