The three touchstones that woke Buddha up - sickness, old age, and death - are a pretty good place to start when crafting a tragic tale. And if we need to get more specific: heartbreak, destruction, miscomprehension, natural disasters, betrayal, and the waste of human potential.

The way I was educated, maybe from just inhaling something in the air back then, I grew up believing that E. B. White occupied the apex of essay writing.

The impossibility of a sequel ever recapturing everything - or anything - about its ancestor never stopped legions of writers from trying, or hordes of readers and publishers from demanding more of what they previously enjoyed.

More than we sleep, play, or make love, we work. Yet despite - or perhaps because of - this dominant daily grind, much of our literature is biased toward other pursuits.