Why should anything exist at all, you might ask?Existence didn’t just spring out of nothing whatsoever. Even if there was a time of No-Thingness, then there must have been an inherent or precursory realm of...

What we love teaches us how to love.

I’m arguably the least real of all my characters, a state of affairs for which I make no apologies, being, indeed, altogether proud of the fact.

Finally, we entered Chetaube County, my imaginary birthplace, where the names of the little winding roads and minuscule mountain communities never failed to inspire me: Yardscrabble, Big Log, Upper, Middle and Lower Pigsty, Chicken Scratch,...

I am, as it were, the created creating—a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have...