In news that nobody can masturbate to, the Literary Review has released the shortlisted entries and winner of their Bad Sex in Fiction Awards for 2013. For the past few weeks they’ve been tweeting small excerpts from books considered for ‘Britain’s Most Dreaded Literary Prize’, for your consideration:
“Her cunt seemed to flutter and I thought of a fish in the bottom of a boat.” #BadSex
— Literary Review (@Lit_Review) December 3, 2013
he attempts to lift his arm in order to pinch her nipples, which are the size and texture of liquorice #BadSex 09
— Literary Review (@Lit_Review) December 3, 2013
Last, but by no means least: She got to his cock and stuck it between her teeth like a cigar #BadSex 99
— Literary Review (@Lit_Review) December 3, 2013
And the winner is… ‘The City of Devi‘ by Manil Suri. The novel is based in Mumbai, or rather an alternative Mumbai which “has emptied under the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation; gangs of marauding Hindu and Muslim thugs rove the desolate streets.” And the scene that won it for Suri? The climax of an extended sex scene involving all three characters ”Sarita, her physicist husband Karun, who has disappeared, and Jaz, a young gay Muslim”:
Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands – only Karun’s body, locked with mine, remains. We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice.
The shortlist included:
. ‘My Education’ by Susan Choi (‘I seemed to come right away, with a hard, popping effervescence, as if her mouth had raised blisters, or an uppermost froth; but beneath, magma still heaved and groaned and was yearning to fling itself into the air’);
. ‘House of Earth’ by Woody Guthrie (‘And as she sucked the last drops of his blood and his seed into the folds of her innermost soul and self, she felt her whole body lift, pull, squeeze, then lift again, tremble, shake, and quiver, and in her fires of her stomach she strained and moved to bathe his blood into the rumble and the thunder of her own.’)
. ‘The Victoria System’ by Eric Reinhardt (‘The zip of her skirt sputtered between her fingernails like a motorboat on a waveless sea … My erection beat time in my underwear.’)
via The Literary Review and Time
