I’ve come to realize that my favorite thing about books is finding very creative similes/metaphors/personification, etc. of descriptions.
i.e Janet Fitch: The hot winds tested the windows like burglars looking for a way in.
Barbara Kingsolver: The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves.
Margaret Atwood: I think of the bad news as a huge bird, with the wings of a crow and the face of my Grade Four schoolteacher, sparse bun, rancid teeth, wrinkly frown, pursed mouth and all, sailing around the world under cover of darkness, pleased to be the bearer of ill tidings, carrying a basket of rotten eggs, and knowing – as the sun comes up – exactly where to drop them. On me, for one.
You get the point.
These are the other authors that I’ve liked who also get creative with their imagery:
Ocean Vuong
Madelline Miller
Heather O’Neill
Kathe Koja
Julia Armfield
CormacMcCarthy
Sylvia Plath
Virginia Woolf
Deirdre Sullivan
Angela Carter
Patrick Leigh Fermor
Anne Carson
Ray Bradbury
I’m not picky about the genre, I don’t mind any, though I do have a preference for a stream-of-consciousness kind of writing. Also, I know Nabokov’s amazing but..I’m not a fan.
by iiFeliscityii
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The Everybody Ensemble (Amy Leach). You should get a good idea of Leach’s love of playful language from the subtitle: Donkeys, Essays, and Other Pandemoniums.
This is a highly imaginative essay collection that’s mostly about animals. The first essay imagines what it would be like to join a choir made up of every living thing, and near the end, a passage reads: “The moths can begin with their soft songs, then the rhythm birds can join in, palm cockatoos knocking twigs on wood, prairie chickens booming. Then — *tutti* — with juncos trilling, turkeys gobbling, leaf frogs sworping, eagles screaming, sea lions barking, babies bawling, elks bugling, and slugs — oh yes, throughout the whole piece will be interspersed the exquisite silence of slugs.”
Leach also included a glossary, but it’s not a researched glossary so much as a place for her to expand juuuust a little on things she wrote earlier in the collection. For example, there’s an entry titled “Maserati,” and all it says is “If flowers could get hold of a Maserati, they would turn it into a big shiny flowerpot.”
Janet Frame, Faces in the Water
J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country
Anything by Joyce Carol Oates.
Gaitskill also is very lush, but she’s very acerbic and contemporary as well. Same goes for Lorrie Moore.
Marilynne Robinson – Housekeeping
All the Living – CE Morgan
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
A very poetic novel filled with all kinds of descriptive writing. Mitchell uses language the way a painter uses color, and his way of describing things both tangible and ephemeral is among the best I have read. The language in some parts is very rough, because it’s written in a dialect, but the majority of the text is written in stream of consciousness style with thoughts plucked straight from the characters’ minds.
“Snow is bruised lilac in half light: such pure solace.”