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

[Joe Allonby]

Dog sex. Where's the dog sex?

On 11/29/06, Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Iain Hollingshead Wins Bad Sex Prize
> - By JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press Writer
> Wednesday, November 29, 2006
>
> (11-29) 11:38 PST LONDON, United Kingdom (AP) --
>
> First-time author Iain Hollingshead scooped a dubious
> literary honor Wednesday, winning the Bad Sex in
> Fiction Award for his novel, "Twenty Something."
>
> Hollingshead beat established writers including Booker
> Prize nominee David Mitchell, best seller Mark Haddon
> and literary maverick Thomas Pynchon to the prize,
> which aims to skewer "the crude, tasteless, often
> perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual
> description in the modern novel."
>
> Judges were moved by Hollingshead's evocation of "a
> commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected
> images and explosions of a million little particles."
> His description of "bulging trousers" sealed the win,
> the judges said.
>
> "Because Hollingshead is a first-time writer, we
> wished to discourage him from further attempts," the
> judges — editors of Literary Review magazine — said in
> a statement. "Heavyweights like Thomas Pynchon and
> Will Self are beyond help at this point."
>
> Hollingshead, 25, who received his award from rocker
> Courtney Love at a London ceremony, said he was
> delighted to become the prize's youngest winner.
>
> "I hope to win it every year," said Hollingshead, who
> receives a statuette and a bottle of champagne.
>
> Now in its 14th year, the award was established by the
> Literary Review 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.
>
> This year's runner-up was Tim Willcocks' medieval
> action novel, "The Religion," for 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.
>
> Willcocks praised the Bad Sex prize as "a much better
> guide to a good read than those purveyors of powerful
> sleeping drugs, the Booker, the Pulitzer, the Goncourt
> et. al."
>
> Other finalists included Mitchell's 1980s
> coming-of-age story, "Black Swan Green," for 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," was nominated for a scene involving a spaniel
> that ends: "Reader, she bit him."
>
> Haddon, the best-selling author of "The Curious
> Incident of the Dog in the Night-time," was
> shortlisted 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 were Scottish writer Irvine
> Welsh's "Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs"; Julia
> Glass'"The Whole World Over"; Michael Cannon's
> "Lachlan's War"; "Tourism" by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal;
> and Self's "The Book of Dave."
>
> 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.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/11/29/entertainment/e113853S62.DTL
>
> --- 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
> >
> >
> http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/books/11/29/books.badsex.ap/index.html
>
>
>
>
>
> ____________________________________________________________________________________
> Want to start your own business?
> Learn how on Yahoo! Small Business.
> http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/r-index
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20061129/0f8f024f/attachment.html>