Bad Sex In Fiction Nominees Revealed
I’m not sure my old friend Michael Cunningham will be pleased to learn his latest nomination. The author of “The Hours” and winner of many awards, including the Pulitzer, is up for this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction award. The Literary Review announced the shortlist for its 22nd annual edition of the prize for what they describe as “the most egregious passage of sexual description in a work of fiction.†Previous winners have included Norman Mailer for “The Castle in the Forest,” Tom Wolfe for “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” and John Updike for an overall Lifetime Achievement Award for his four consecutive “Bad Sex†nominations. This year’s nominees are a rather distinguished bunch, counting not only Cunningham but also Haruki Murakami and this year’s Man Booker prize winner Richard Flanagan. Feast — feast! — on this Flanagan passage: ‘He felt the improbable weight of her eyelash with his own; he kissed the slight, rose-coloured trench that remained from her knicker elastic, running around her belly like the equator line circling the world.’
