She published her first story at 14, and her prose and poems drew favorable notice.

Chronicling the lives of working-class people, The Vanishing Moon was a critical success, and Coulson's prose, themes, and historical range drew comparisons with John Steinbeck, William Maxwell, and Russell Banks.

One quality that's distinctive among writers of an experimental bent is his limpidity: his prose rarely draws attention to itself; most of the time, the reader is fully occupied imagining what is being recounted and described.

Lafferty's quirky prose drew from traditional storytelling styles, largely from the Irish and Native American, and his shaggy-dog characters and tall tales are unique in science fiction.

One is "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung" (Knopf), an anthology of writings by the late rock critic Lester Bangs, whose kamikaze-like prose drew its ferocious energy from the music he celebrated.

Murray, who has written about American culture in books like "Stomping the Blues" and "The Hero and the Blues," says his prose draws its sensibility from blues and jazz.

Barbu's prose, in which the influence of neorealism has been noted, drew comparison to the works of Mateiu Caragiale, Tudor Arghezi, and Curzio Malaparte.

But now the life of Mr. Barthelme, who has written 11 books and whose stylish prose has drawn comparisons to Ernest Hemingway, has taken a turn that could have come from his own pages.

-and in straightforward prose, written mostly in the present tense (invisibly and expertly translated from the Danish by Anna Paterson), Jungersen draws us into this unhappy, claustrophobic environment.

From Borders.com, one reader says that A Swift Pure Cry "uses Irish dialect and lyrical prose to draw the reader into Shell's world.