Who's going to win this year's Bad Sex Award?

[Dave Monroe]

Who's going to win this year's Bad Sex Award?
POSTED: 12:53 p.m. EST, November 29, 2006

LONDON, England (AP) -- Will the winner be the
unfortunate canine encounter, the tryst in a
blacksmith's forge or the girl with the Space Hopper
breasts?

Eight authors, including Booker Prize nominee David
Mitchell, best seller Mark Haddon and literary
maverick Thomas Pynchon, were competing Wednesday for
one of the world's least-coveted literary prizes --
the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

Rocker Courtney Love was recruited to announce the
winner at a London ceremony.

Now in its 14th year, the award was established by
Literary Review magazine to celebrate truly
cringe-worthy erotic writing.

"It's mixed metaphors, embarrassing fumbling. It's the
redundancy of the scene in an otherwise good novel,"
said assistant editor Philip Womack.

Judges say the award's mandate is "to draw attention
to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of
redundant passages of sexual description in the modern
novel, and to discourage it."

In the latter aim, it has failed. This year's crop of
finalists includes passages as lurid and ludicrous as
any in memory.

Tim Willcocks' medieval action novel, "The Religion,"
features a scene in which characters grapple
passionately in a forge "across the cold steel face of
the anvil."

"In the pit of his stomach a cauldron boiled and some
seething and nameless brew rose up through his spine
and filled his brain with the Devil's Fire," Willcocks
writes.

Mitchell's 1980s coming-of-age story, "Black Swan
Green," has been praised by critics. But Bad Sex
judges were drawn to a passage in which one
character's breasts are compared to "a pair of
Danishes" and another's to "two Space Hoppers."

Pynchon's long-awaited, 1,000-page novel, "Against the
Day," is nominated for a scene involving a spaniel
that ends: "Reader, she bit him."

Haddon, author of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in
the Night-time," is nominated for his description of
rapture in his latest novel, "A Spot of Bother":
"Images went off in her head like little fireworks.
The smell of coconut. Brass firedogs."

The other finalists are Scottish writer Irvine Welsh's
"Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs"; Julia Glass'
"The Whole World Over"; Iain Hollingshead's
"Twentysomething"; Michael Cannon's "Lachlan's War";
"Tourism" by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal; and Will Self's
"The Book of Dave."

Winners receive a "semiabstract statuette representing
Sex in the 1950s" and a bottle of champagne -- but
only if they show up at the ceremony. In the past,
most have.

"It's a very jolly affair," Womack said. "It's not
meant to humiliate."

Last year's winner was food critic and novelist Giles
Coren for a memorable passage comparing a male
character's genitalia to a shower hose. In 2004, the
prize went to Tom Wolfe's novel "I Am Charlotte
Simmons" for sex scenes the judges called "ghastly ...
inept ... (and) unrealistic."

http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/books/11/29/books.badsex.ap/index.html


 
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