Excerpts

Happened across some beautiful lyricism recently, first in Michael Chabon's "Gentlemen of the Road" which serves it up tinged with humor:

...its bowl filled with a nasty-looking brown mixture, and when Hanukkah parted his cracked lips, the Frank struck a flint to the bowl of the pipe and encouraged Hanukkah to draw the thick, honeyed smoke into his lungs. Hanukkah coughed, and then drew again, and it was not long before he was aware of being filled, in rippling drizzles, by a stream of amber honey poured through his mouth and neck into the bottle of his soul.

Another from Chabon:

...forest and snow that Amram understood to be the habitations of witches and snow djinn and warrior women who rode on the backs of bears and of giant deer. In the wind was a promise only of ice, storm and advancing darkness, and Amram knelt on the northern slope of a strange mountain, far from home, drew his woolen cloak more tightly around his shoulders and knew in his heart that he would end his days in some winter kingdom, among wintry men. Then, as if overhearing and taking pity on the maudlin trend of his thoughts, the wind carried to his nostrils from the fires of the troops camped in the valley the desert tang of a camel-dung fire, and with it the plangent cry of a soldier-muezzin calling his saddle-weary brothers to a belated Jumuah. ... A pair of pickets held the southern approach to the camp, and there were guards posted on the north and west sides of camp, all fine, tall, falcon-faced men, in excellent equipage and reasonable order, but to Amram's eye as he had studied them and their fellows in the last of the daylight they betrayed an indifference to their duty, a hint of discontent, as if they had better things to do and expected no trouble or enemy from any quarter. Something was roiling them. He wondered if perhaps they suffered from the discontent of indolence, patrolling a frontier that had been at peace too long, the last war between the Khazars and the armies of the Caliph having been...

And via Steven Riddle's new blog, there's a taste of William Trevor's prose:

[referring to Ireland] They loved it in different ways: unspoken in the dark, that was another intimation. For Grattan there was history's tale, regrets and sorrows and distress, the voices of unconquered men, the spirit of women as proud as empresses. For Grattan there were the rivers he knew, the mountains he had never climbed, wild fuchsia by a seashore and the swallows that came back, turf smoke on the air of little towns, the quiet in long glens. The sound, the look, the shape of Ireland, and Ireland's rain and Ireland's sunshine, and Ireland's living and Ireland's dead: all that.