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In Celebration of Bad Sex
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The 2005 finalists for the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction contest have been announced, and they include Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, and John Updike. You can read the complete list and the passages for which the offending authors were nominated here. Laist's (least) favorite follows, from Marlon Brando's godawful, posthumously published novel, Fan Tan;
"Oh, Lord," he cried out. "I'm a-comin'!"
She could not answer. It is the one drawback of fellatio as conscientious as hers that it eliminates the chance for small talk and poetry alike.
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We recommend reading all of them. When Tom Wolfe won last year, for I Am Charlotte Simmons, he famously claimed to have been misunderstood, saying "...you can lead an English literary wannabe to irony but you can't make him get it." We'll be the judge of that.
More info from the Guardian, via ArtsJournal: Now in its 13th year, the prize, which only targets literary fiction, aims "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it." The winner, who will be announced on December 1 at the In & Out Club in London, is awarded a semi-abstract statue representing sex in the 1950s and a bottle of champagne, if he or she turns up.
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