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

[Joe Allonby]

Quick! What page is the dogggie sex scene on?

On 11/29/06, Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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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