The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Cohen, Sam. Sarahland. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2021.

Sarahland is a collection of 10 short stories. In the title story, a young woman named Sarah attends college and lives in an all-female dorm off campus. All of her friends in the dorm are also named Sarah. She feels alienated from these friends because she is interested in more than just meeting a husband. Sarah decides to take a class called Integrated Liberal Studies, which is also taken by another girl in her dorm, Sasha. After class, Sarah and Sasha have drinks and Sarah feels drawn to Sasha, particularly after Sasha mentions kissing a female teacher's assistant. One night, all of the Sarahs and Sasha go out to a bar. Sarah is having a great time until the teacher's assistant arrives and she and Sasha begin flirting. Sarah announces her desire to leave and a boy at the bar offers to walk her home. He sexually assaults her in the doorway of the dorm. Feeling despondent but resigned, Sarah enters the dorm and goes to bed.

In “Naked Furniture,” the protagonist Sarah drops out of college and goes through a period of existential despair. Her life takes a turn when she goes on a date with a woman named Katherine. After the date, Katherine gives Sarah a merry widow corset out of the trunk of her car, mentioning that she used to wear it at work. Later, Sarah finds Katherine's place of employment online and goes there herself. It is a yellow house where women dress in costumes and act out sexual fantasies for men. Sarah is hired and she finds this work liberating. However, she is annoyed to discover that another woman who works there, Steele, is one of her former college classmates. Sarah and Steele were both excellent students who won scholarships in an essay contest. Sarah wonders why Steele left academia to become a sex worker, seemingly questioning her own choices by association.

In “Exoricsm, Or Eating My Twin,” a woman named Sarah recalls a recent painful breakup. She meets Tegan at a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan convention. The two bond over their interest in the show and Sarah's fan fiction. Sarah moves in with Tegan, who she views as her twin. She even begins imitating Tegan's style of dress and mannerisms. However, a short time later, Tegan tells Sarah that they are starting a gender transition and would prefer the use of “they/them” pronouns. This causes Sarah distress, because she feels like Tegan will no longer be her twin. Tegan, annoyed by Sarah's bad reaction and also wishing to see other people, asks Sarah to leave. Sarah feels better about the breakup after writing a fan fiction story in which the vampire characters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer eat some of the human characters.

In “Dream Palace,” narrated in second person, Sarah exits the highway after seeing a sign reading “DREAM PALACE” (91). She finds a large building with no obvious entrance, and eventually manages to squeeze inside through a small gap. She finds herself in a red room that reminds her of a womb. From there, she slides into another room where she is licked by two creatures with human bodies and cat heads. Making her way through a series of equally bizarre rooms, Sarah finally makes her way out of the building, emerging with a more definitive destination in mind.

“The First Sarah” is a retelling of the biblical story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar. Sari and Abey marry and Abey learns from God that he is meant to be “the father of many nations” (99). However, Sari is unable to conceive a child. They travel to Egypt to ask for help during a famine and the Egyptian king gives them a handmaiden named Hagar as a gift. Sari and Hagar develop a romantic relationship. They plan to have Abey impregnate Hagar so they can raise a baby together. Hagar gives birth to a son, Ishmael, but after a few years, Abey says that Ishmael must have his own room and Hagar must return to the servants' quarters. When Sari does not object to this, Hagar kidnaps Ishmael and runs away. In the wilderness, she is unable to find water. God hides a stream from her and tells her he will reveal it if she returns to Sari and Abey. She agrees. God finally allows Sari to conceive a child, whom she calls Isaac, and renames her Sarah. The narrators claim to have heard this story from Mother Nature after eating foraged mushrooms.

In “Gemstones,” friends Ry and Jamie, both poets, spend the day together. They go to a mall where Ry happens upon a game in the arcade called The Sarah Machine. The game allows players to look and sound like famous people named Sarah. Ry and Jamie play the game, becoming Sarah Paulson, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sarah Schulman, and others. When they return to Ry's apartment, Ry's partner Manny reminds Ry that they have dinner plans. Ry wants to invite Jamie but Manny does not want Jamie to come. Ry hears Sarah Schulman's voice commenting that bullies “conceptualize themselves as under attack when they are the ones originating the pain” (140). Ry tells Manny that they should go to dinner alone.

In “Gossip,” a group of friends narrates the breakup of a couple named Ada and Evan, with each friend offering their own insight and opinion on the cause of the relationship's end. The breakup happened after a party when the couple was having sex and Ada asked Evan to choke her. The friends' consensus is that Evan prefers a more traditional, less sexually assertive woman.

In “Becoming Trees,” the narrator and her partner, Jan, feel existential boredom and distress because so many of their friends' lives have changed drastically while theirs have stayed the same. To remedy this, they become trees and plant themselves in their backyard.

In “All the Teenaged Sarahs,” the protagonist, Sarah, receives a TV/VCR for her 12th birthday. Inside the VCR is a tape advertising a horse camp. Visiting the horse camp becomes a lifelong fixation. In college, she majors in zoology, hoping to work with horses. She joins a sorority, but the other girls are cruel to her. She drops out of college and begins a relationship with a woman she meets named Nancy. When Nancy breaks up with her, Sarah gets in her car and begins driving across the country. She stops at a book store and discovers a book featuring maps of queer businesses across the U.S. Later, she pulls off the highway and walks into a grove of trees, where she discovers the horse camp of her fantasies. She decides not to stay, opting instead to visit the queer businesses from the book.

In “The Purple Epoch,” the world has ended as a result of pollution and humanity is extinct. The continents sink under the purple, plastic-filled ocean. One day, a new continent emerges. Bacteria evolve into creatures that walk and talk. One of these creatures is named Sah-wah. While out walking one day, she discovers a glass prism and looks through it in wonder, seeing a rainbow.