If description is the art of distillation, what’s the ideal potato-to-vodka ratio? Sit down and stay awhile: things are about to get metaphysical.

Michael Byers on how to succeed – and fail – in the first person.

Poetry—it isn’t just for poets! In her latest column, Katie Umans recommends straying from fiction with the following books: Kingdom Animalia, Something in the Potato Room, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, and Lucky Fish.

Celeste Ng offers compelling proof that storytellers aren’t so different from scientists: both explore the same very large, very dark, very crowded room, poking and prodding and tirelessly asking, what if?

TV, greed, comfort, surprise: but a few of the reasons sequels bewitch us. Why we love more – more story, more character. How sequels draw us in, why we crave them, and which ones we’d pay a million bucks to see in print.

Marriage is so last century. Natalie Bakopoulos contemplates the demise of the marriage plot and Jeffrey Eugenides’s complex, undermining revival of it in his aptly-titled novel, The Marriage Plot. Is love still the ultimate trump card? Dear reader, it is. With some qualifications.

“What a bitch of a thing prose is!” Gustave Flaubert wrote in a letter to his lover Louise Colet in 1852. “It’s never finished; there’s always something to redo. Yet I think one can give it the consistency of verse. A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.” In this essay, contributing editor Travis Holland meditates on Flaubert’s influence and legacy in fiction.

Poet Debra Albery examines the influence of Sherwood Anderson on her writing, and on her understanding of her own history and place. She writes: “If I came into writing feeling largely without history or place, writing became a means of discovering both; it also became [...] a means of discovering a way out, the road ahead. Sherwood Anderson gave me a map.”

What do the 2011 Japanese Tsunami, the Cuban Missile Crisis and one family’s personal heartbreak have in common? For Ellen Prentiss Campbell the answer lies in Pearl S. Buck’s 1948 young adult novel The Big Wave and the individual acts of creative defiance that help survivors not only carry on, but value life’s beauty more highly because they know it will not last.

Step two: engage. Sozopol coverage continues with Molly Antopol’s conversation with Bulgarian author Miroslav Penkov and Lee Kaplan Romer’s meditation on writing as an act of defiance and grace.