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From the jaws of boredom, Mark Moskowitz snatches a saga that is as unexpectedly gripping as it is expertly executed. In 1972, Moskowitz bought a book called The Stones of Summer by a young new novelist named Dow Mossman. A distracted teenager, he didn't finish reading it, but when he picked it up again in the late '90s, Moskowitz found it to be a work of such illuminating genius that he was determined to contact the author. As told in this documentary, the journey takes the filmmaker from the skyscraper suites of Manhattan publishers to the dingy university offices of writers who once studied by Mossman's side. And along the way, the object of Moskowitz's pursuit ever so subtly shifts--from a single man gone missing to the bundle of questions that dogs his trail, like why so many great writers never recover from their first novel, and how, even in this post-literate age, books still manage to shape the people who read them. Throughout, Moskowitz inserts his tender impressions on these matters, rendering lustrous, poetic scenes that stand out among the crop of recent documentary films.