His books on Richard Yates, John Cheever, and Charles Jackson are exhaustively researched, soup-to-nuts narratives — packed with what seems to be every dream, drink, and sexual encounter that each of these men enjoyed or endured (or both) during their troubled lives.
The episodic narrative, packed with celebrity walk-ons (Pu Yi, the puppet emperor in Manchuria; Truman Capote), is always fascinating but sometimes dizzyingly unfocused.
Set in 15th century Spain, the Verdi opera is a high flown, sprawling melodrama flamboyantly defiant of linear narrative, packed with all manner of fantastic and bizarre incidents: child abductions, witch burnings, vengeful gypsies locked in dungeons.
And if there were a prize for joyfulness in fiction, Toews would win hands down for the near-miraculous feat of transforming suicide and grief into a narrative packed with laugh-out-loud delights.
The subplot has its own style: exaggerated colors, heavy contrast, sparser narrative packed with more hot points of horror than the main narrative of Watchmen.
Don't be fooled by the sing-along frivolity – the narrative is packed with edgy, progressive and humorous themes.
Alongside his own downward-spiraling narrative, Mr. Grimes packs this story with book world gossip, the way you stud a leg of lamb with garlic before sticking it in the oven.
Which goes to show just how much narrative meaning one can pack into even something as seemingly innocuous as grammar.
Mainly, though, the coming season looks like a reshuffling of the same limited pack of narrative cards: "Cinderella," "Le Corsaire," "Don Quixote," "Giselle," "Nutcracker," "Onegin," "Romeo," "Sleeping Beauty," "Swan Lake".
"In a world packed with narratives that overlap, 'Shahada' pinpoints in precise moments the forces in its characters' complicated lives — work and love, immigration and Islam," said a statement announcing the awards.
