I said in an earlier post that Jeff VanDerMeer came the closest to blending literary sensiblities with a quality plot.

I take that back. I think Marge Piercy, a much less well-known writer, does it better. So far I’ve read Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She and It and both have strong, comprehensible plots as well as high-quality writing. In fact, if you removed the plot, added some pretension and some of the usual unnecessary literary foofaraw and set them in the required NYC, both could be literary novels.

Piercy excels at description while not overburdening readers with needless detail. Parsimony with precision is difficult in writing, so I admire that.