Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Literary Review's Bad Sex Awards

The organizers call it Britain's "most dreaded literary prize". The contest 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."

This is its 15th year, and {drum roll, please} the winner is the late Norman Mailer.

A section of the scene:
"So Klara turned head to foot, and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth, and took his old battering ram into her lips. Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement. She sucked on him nonetheless with an avidity that could come only from the Evil One - that she knew. From there, the impulse had come. So now they both had their heads at the wrong end, and the Evil One was there. He had never been so close before.
The Hound began to come to life. Right in her mouth. It surprised her. Alois had been so limp. But now he was a man again! His mouth lathered with her sap, he turned around and embraced her face with all the passion of his own lips and face, ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety."

You can read the finalist entries at http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2217735,00.html

Frightening, truly frightening. Thank goodness these authors were writing important, socially acceptable fiction, not those *gasp* trashy romances so many people snear at or don't want to admit to reading. ;-) They'd give erotic romance a bad name.

3 comments:

Jessica Freely said...

>Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement.

Good lord! That's awful!

Little hint, Norm, don't make up scatalogical metaphors for things your heroine is going to put in her mouth. Gross!

Kim Knox said...

Ewwww, that is gross.

Reading the others, I had to snort at Jeanette Winterson's robot:

'Yes. I used up three silicon-lined vaginas.'

artlover said...

I found this hilarious...Everything you shouldn't do, as far as I'm concerned. Let's hope none of us EC or CP writers transgress to this extent. Jean