This Is How You Lose The Time War is sci fi prose that I personally love, but I know some people find pretty purple.
"Blue carries nothing with her between strands except knowledge, purpose, tactics, and Red's letters. Memory is tipped and decanted into Garden, life to life to life, always deepening, thickening, growing new roots and efficiencies-but Red's letters she keeps in her own body, curled beneath her tongue like coins, printed in her fingers' tips, between the lines of her palms. She presses them against her teeth before kissing her marks, reads them over when she shifts her grip on motorcycle handles, dusts soldiers' chins with them in bar fights and barracks games. She thinks without thinking, often, of what she will name Red in her next letter-hides her lists in plausibly deniable dreamscapes, on the undersides of milkweed leaves, in shed chrysalis and wingtip. Vermillion Lie. Scarlet Tanager. Parthian Thread. My Red, Red Rose."
Mink River (Brian Doyle) is maybe more of a litfic vibe but does contain elements of magical realism. It has beautiful and very unique prose that I would recommend for that alone.
For example: "And the light itself-well, there's a certain certainness of light here, the way it shafts itself through and around things confidently, exuberantly, densely, substantively; it has something to do with the nearby ocean, maybe. Or the rain, which falls eight months a year. Or the sheer jungle energy of trees and plants here, where the flora release so many feminine ions that the light fractures into geometric patterns that are organized along magnetic lines coherent with the tides and sometimes visible to the naked eye.
Really and truly."
and "and so many more stories, all changing by the minute, all swirling and braiding and weaving and spinning and stitching themselves one to another and to the stories of creatures in that place, both the quick sharp-eyed ones and the rooted green ones and the ones underground and the ones too small to see, and to stories that used to be here, and still are here in ways that you can sense sometimes if you listen with your belly, and the first green shoots of stories that will be told in years to come-so many stories braided and woven and inter stitched and leading one to another like spider strands or synapses or creeks that you could listen patiently for a hundred years and never hardly catch more than shards and shreds of the incalculable ocean of stories just in this one town, not big, not small, bounded by four waters, in the hills, by the coast, end of May, first salmonberries just ripe. But you sure can try to catch a few, yes?"
If YA is okay, I find All the Crooked Saints very beautiful and also unique. (Somewhere between our-world fantasy and magical realism.)
"You can hear a miracle a long way after dark.
Miracles are very like radio waves in this way. Not many people realize that the ordinary radio wave and the extraordinary miracle have much in common. Left to their own devices, radio waves would not be audible for much more than forty or fifty miles. They travel on perfectly straight paths from their broadcast source, and because the Earth is round, it does not take them long to part ways with the ground and head out to the stars. Wouldn't we all, if we had the chance? What a shame that both miracles and radio waves are invisible, because it would be quite a sight: ribbons of marvel and sound stretching out straight and true from all over the world.
But not all radio waves and miracles escape unheard. Some bounce off the ceiling of the ionosphere, where helpful free electrons oscillate in joyful harmony with them before thrusting them back to Earth at new angles."
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I have some book recs for you!
This Is How You Lose The Time War is sci fi prose that I personally love, but I know some people find pretty purple.
"Blue carries nothing with her between strands except knowledge, purpose, tactics, and Red's letters. Memory is tipped and decanted into Garden, life to life to life, always deepening, thickening, growing new roots and efficiencies-but Red's letters she keeps in her own body, curled beneath her tongue like coins, printed in her fingers' tips, between the lines of her palms. She presses them against her teeth before kissing her marks, reads them over when she shifts her grip on motorcycle handles, dusts soldiers' chins with them in bar fights and barracks games. She thinks without thinking, often, of what she will name Red in her next letter-hides her lists in plausibly deniable dreamscapes, on the undersides of milkweed leaves, in shed chrysalis and wingtip. Vermillion Lie. Scarlet Tanager. Parthian Thread. My Red, Red Rose."
Mink River (Brian Doyle) is maybe more of a litfic vibe but does contain elements of magical realism. It has beautiful and very unique prose that I would recommend for that alone.
For example: "And the light itself-well, there's a certain certainness of light here, the way it shafts itself through and around things confidently, exuberantly, densely, substantively; it has something to do with the nearby ocean, maybe. Or the rain, which falls eight months a year. Or the sheer jungle energy of trees and plants here, where the flora release so many feminine ions that the light fractures into geometric patterns that are organized along magnetic lines coherent with the tides and sometimes visible to the naked eye.
Really and truly."
and "and so many more stories, all changing by the minute, all swirling and braiding and weaving and spinning and stitching themselves one to another and to the stories of creatures in that place, both the quick sharp-eyed ones and the rooted green ones and the ones underground and the ones too small to see, and to stories that used to be here, and still are here in ways that you can sense sometimes if you listen with your belly, and the first green shoots of stories that will be told in years to come-so many stories braided and woven and inter stitched and leading one to another like spider strands or synapses or creeks that you could listen patiently for a hundred years and never hardly catch more than shards and shreds of the incalculable ocean of stories just in this one town, not big, not small, bounded by four waters, in the hills, by the coast, end of May, first salmonberries just ripe. But you sure can try to catch a few, yes?"
If YA is okay, I find All the Crooked Saints very beautiful and also unique. (Somewhere between our-world fantasy and magical realism.)
"You can hear a miracle a long way after dark.
Miracles are very like radio waves in this way. Not many people realize that the ordinary radio wave and the extraordinary miracle have much in common. Left to their own devices, radio waves would not be audible for much more than forty or fifty miles. They travel on perfectly straight paths from their broadcast source, and because the Earth is round, it does not take them long to part ways with the ground and head out to the stars. Wouldn't we all, if we had the chance? What a shame that both miracles and radio waves are invisible, because it would be quite a sight: ribbons of marvel and sound stretching out straight and true from all over the world.
But not all radio waves and miracles escape unheard. Some bounce off the ceiling of the ionosphere, where helpful free electrons oscillate in joyful harmony with them before thrusting them back to Earth at new angles."