I am a huge fan of fiction where each passage has a poetic flow, particularity diving into the thoughts of individual characters.
I chose Fitzgerald and Nabokov because personally I think their works are the absolute pinnacle of prose, but my other favorite authors are Jhumpa Lahiri, Hunter S Thompson, Khaled Hosseini, Haruki Murakami, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
I also recently read Water for Elephants and All the Light we Cannot See, which I really enjoyed because they have this style.
by Bussinessbacca
9 Comments
Joyce, Melville, Faulkner, and Hemingway!
Personally, Virginia Woolf is absolute peak prose. If you haven’t read her you really should.
All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren is one of those books where the prose is so good it makes my stomach flutter and I go “holy SHIT” out loud.
Edit to add: Robert Penn Warren was poet laureate and won the Pulitzer Prize for the book.
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Little, Big by John Crowley comes to mind. I found the prose very poetic. And the characters are well fleshed out, very realistic. It’s long. And, I guess you’d call it urban fantasy.
William Faulkner
Herman Melville
David Mitchell
Jack Kerouac
Jeanette Winterson
Ray Bradbury
Cormac McCarthy
Thomas Wolfe
Tolstoy, especially Maude translations. I read War and Peace last year and was floored, and Anna Karenina is shaking up to be just as insightful
Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels.
Also anything by William Gibson, the “inventor” of cyberpunk.
John Steinbeck