The greatest literary passage written in the last 30 years?

I happened to have just sniffed it, then hoovered it like a Dyson at full charge.

Took a bite two-times too large, chewed it halfway, swallowed it; to digest at a GLP-1-driven metabolically-slow snail's pace, wondering if I'm calorically-complete or nauseous or just both at the same time.

No no, that wasn't the passage.

I mean, that was hardly anything at all.

I think we can both agree it was overwritten and under-edited. I might argue that passage was boring, an overreach to be current - or an attempt at something that could have been explosive but landed more dangerous, like a 50 megaton bomb, whole and tilted, half-buried on a sandy beach.

Have you read Faulkner?

^{Unfortunately, that passage wasn't by him - which only proves to me that even if you claim to have read Faulkner you do so without any regularity, not that I imagine anyone does except under coercion, sometime around the 8th grade perhaps, when teachers assign books with passages so maddening and inconclusive and of such excruciating length that they seem less sentences than weather systems, mere run-ons deprived of punctuation or burdened with so much punctuation as to produce the same effect entirely, much like a driver who neglects a turn signal and causes you to brake hard enough to spill your coffee, after which the incident ceases to be about mortality and becomes, as so many adult grievances do, about upholstery.}

and which is part of the point, I suppose: the passage I'm referring to is from a book written as a single, long, run-on sentence to mimic the endlessness of the war, with paragraphs starting with ‘and’, which seems most absurd of course, as if barking like a carney, drawing you in to a spectacle, only to be seen to be believed, like a bearded lady or proposed sea alien floating in a tank of murky blue-tinged water,

I'm aware we both secretly wish this passage to be written by the great American novelist, George Saunders. I recognize you are the braggart sort, snootily asking if one has read Lincoln in the Bardo during cocktail hours.

If you actually knew Saunders, you might have read one of his more obscure works, like Fox 8, which I've read front to back at least twenty times - all 50 pages indeed, you cad.

It's a sermon on environmentalism and family spun from the lanuge of a fox, which is a litery feet yu have to red to beleeve, Yuman, altho it soundz like yu haven't, do yu no if thei will bee bring ut any more of thoze coktale weeniez?

And don't get me started on Percival Everett’s James, which is an absurdly worthy read.

You'll hardly be able to put it down, although you reading it is likely your attempt at staying current, like cutting your hair into a late-to-the-trend mullet-mohawk, or picking up a hackey sack again.

I, for one, am offended Mark Twain didn't even comment on the material - not so much as a book-jacket testimonial, or at the very least acknowledge it with a four-star Amazon review.

Also you should read José Saramago's Blindness. Because who is to say, a "quotation mark" is necessary, when dialogue could just use a comma, He said.

Punctuation; indeed; is to be taken in the eye of the beholder, and is really the allowance of cadence. and. rhythm, even if you think it incorrect according to those blathering Oxford dictionary folks and their attempt at absconding with the comma, which isn't at all for sale.

In any event, you might recognize all of this foreshadowing as a literary device, so might as well let the proverbial mauled kitten out of the rucksack here, because we're talking about Daniel Krause's excellent Angel Down, a tale of five soldiers on a mission to euthanize a comrade only to find an angel, down as it were,

and which seems most boring and couldn't possibly fill 304 pages, yet somehow, even then, won a Pulitzer in 2026, which you can't say for Saunders who has only won a Booker prize which, while admirable, is a different length of candle entirely,

And, so, the passage:

and the horizons bruise with muted but super-colossal orange flashes that demarcate tracts of mutilated tree trunks, en masse they look like creeping squads of gnarled gnomes, most of them prune black but a few broken open to sapwood so shocking white they look like combat nurses in unblemished dresses, standing in the foggy rain, plotting amputations,

Ok, you are finally catching my drift, right? The writing is truly magical, a defining leap in story telling, a stylistic tour-de-force,

<as if anyone has actually read this far, you twit>

I'd beg you to read the passage again,

To understand the depth of the prose, to be able to pack such a punch in such limited space. One paragraph, five commas, adjective violence, internal alliteration - the mouth stopping, the sentence looks flowing but sounds interrupted - image evolution, the maddening postponement of completion,

and all of this before you can so much as say eggamuffin were you thinking about grabbing some breakfast.