8 writers nominated for the bad sex award
8 writers nominatedfor the bad sex award
LONDON -- 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.
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."
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." Willcocks writes: "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."
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."
Today's birthdays
Actor Efrem Zimbalist Jr. is 89. Actor Robert Guillaume is 79. TV personality and producer Dick Clark is 77. Radio talk show host G. Gordon Liddy is 76. Movie director Ridley Scott is 69. Rock musician Roger Glover (Deep Purple) is 61. Playwright David Mamet is 59. Actor Mandy Patinkin is 54. Singer Billy Idol is 51. Comedian Colin Mochrie is 49. Former football and baseball player Bo Jackson is 44. Actor-director Ben Stiller is 41. Actress Sandra Oh is 36. Singer Clay Aiken is 28. Actress Elisha Cuthbert is 24.
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