Is that easier or harder to write than straight prose?
Morgan excels at straight prose — you could carve four or five realist novellas out of "The Sport of Kings" — but she makes use of many other forms: sermons, textbooks, rules, excerpts from other works (real and invented), Socratic dialogues, flashbacks, parables, stage plays.
He dispatched plenty of stories on Beacon Hill malfeasance, large and small, in old-school, tell-it-to-me-straight prose.
Markovits builds this novel out of straight-plank prose, its lines and structure as pleasingly solid and clean as those of a Shaker chair.
All or almost all of them had been touched in some way by Mr. Burroughs's varied body of work, which includes straight hard-boiled prose fiction, autobiography, nonrepresentational writing using the cut-up technique invented by Brion Gysin, science fiction of a sort, barbed satire, accounts of drug experiences and attitudinal or political pronouncements.
The good news is that in "The Maytrees," despite the big words and the name-dropping, despite remnants of what Welty called the "receptivity so high-strung and high-minded" on display in "Pilgrim," there is also good old straight narrative and prose that is often, yes, breathtakingly illuminative.
Mr. Hosseini, who was born in Kabul and moved to the United States in 1980, writes in straight-ahead, utilitarian prose and creates characters who have the simplicity and primary-colored emotions of people in a fairy tale or fable.
Churchill also inspired by straight talk, though his prose was more polished.
Whenever I come back to it, the strange rhythm and texture of the prose transports me straight to Newfoundland.
Further, the authors, who frequently deviated from straight science-speak into lyrical prose, confessed that "... herring fresh from the water are among the most delicious of our fishes......
Katsu, A&S '04 (MA), steers her elegant prose into more straight horror territory with her new novel, The Hunger.
