The economy of style, graceful prose, and gentle irony of Aluko's novels brought him critical acclaim.
Khadra's prose is gentle and precise, but the violent climax of the book makes a powerful point about what can happen to a man when "the light of his conscience has gone out".
One was Mr Havel's: "The Power of the Powerless", a reflection on the mind of a greengrocer who obediently puts a poster "among the onions and carrots" urging "Workers of the World—Unite!" In gentle, ironic but scathing prose, Mr Havel exposed the lies and cowardice that made possible the communist grip on power.
In gentle but rock-firm prose, Ms. Brown's shrewdly chiseled stories observed the well-worn manners and mannerisms of long-established Southerners, both black and white, and described the ingrown complexities — the family conflicts, the racial delicacies (and indelicacies) and the imperatives of church and community — in a region waking to the modern world.
A few months later, while convalescing from an operation that had left me temporarily immobilised, and after trying and failing to read a number of works by my favourite authors, I found the simple prose and gentle (albeit black) humour of The Love Department was all my shattered concentration could deal with.
He also employed the use of nuanced dialogic prose with gentle Tamil overtones based on the nature of his characters.
And a poet Patti Smith most definitely is, her ways of looking and noting defined by a light, gentle wisdom, unencumbered by prose and lengthy explanations.
"Goldengrove" is one of Ms. Prose's gentler books — far more so than the bitingly satirical "A Changed Man".
His prose is often gentle for a man of such passion, which makes the put-downs all the more caustic.
Jim Jarmusch's new film in competition here in Cannes is a delight: a prose-poem of gentle comic humility and acceptance of life.
