trysail
Catch Me Who Can
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Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award or "No Bad Sex, Please, We're Critics"
Why, I ask you, would a piece like the one below grab the attention of a Literotician?
A: (1) It's putting cheese in a mousetrap?
A: (2) It's catnip for a cat?
A: (3) It's putting a rabbit in front of a dog?
A: (4) It's as the flame is to a moth?
____________________________________________
No Bad Sex, Please, We're Critics:
U.K. Authors Brace for Award
By Hephzibah Anderson
Nov. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Britain's most anxiously awaited literary prize will be granted this evening, when hardworking judges present some lucky novelist with the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
Previously won by Tom Wolfe and Sebastian Faulks, the contest dishonors the author of the year's most atrociously torrid sex scene. The eight finalists for 2007 include seamy passages from the late Norman Mailer's ``The Castle in the Forest'' and Ali Smith's ``Girl Meets Boy.''
The London monthly inaugurated the annual award in 1993 ``to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.''
They have a point. Among this year's finalists, robots do it, paunchy tycoons do it, even William Shakespeare, clinging to Anne Hathaway's ``heaving haunches,'' does it.
The contest pits Mailer's incestuous Hitler clan and Smith's earthly embodiment of the mythical Iphis against the lusty automaton in Jeanette Winterson's ``The Stone Gods,'' a Russian oligarch in Gary Shteyngart's ``Absurdistan,'' and the breathless Bard in Christopher Rush's ``Will.''
Other finalists included Clare Clark, whose heroine becomes ``unhooked by longing'' in ``The Nature of Monsters.'' Richard Milward made the cut with ``Apples,'' whose quaking young hero turns out to be all talk and no sizzle. And who could resist actor David Thewlis's ``The Late Hector Kipling,'' about an artist who dabbles in S&M?
`Spasms and Snaps'
(The hero endures a poultice of hot dripping wax and cold lager before the core of his soul ``spasms and snaps, spilling out its filthy pips.'')
Gleefully billed as ``Britain's most dreaded literary prize,'' the award was dreamed up by critic Rhoda Koenig and enthusiastically inaugurated by the magazine's late editor, Auberon Waugh.
Waugh's own father, Evelyn Waugh, was no stranger to steamy scenes: Witness the passage in ``Brideshead Revisited'' where narrator Charles Ryder recalls his moment of bliss between the ``narrow loins'' of Julia Mottram, sister of his close friend Sebastian Flyte.
Anyone can suggest a specimen of tacky sex that merits the award. The only prize for the winning author is an abstract statuette depicting what the Literary Review calls ``sex in the 1950s.''
Wolfe Fights Back
Most recipients blush and bear the dubious media exposure with good grace, though Wolfe and Faulks both declined to receive their laurels in person. Wolfe even struck back at the judges, claiming that they had failed to understand the deliberate irony in his winning scenes from ``I Am Charlotte Simmons.''
A fixture in London's literary calendar, the award is routinely invoked by reviewers warning readers off squirm- inducing works. Pornographic or expressly erotic works are excluded from the contest. Yet the judging panel, which consists of Literary Review staff, always finds plenty to choose from.
In previous years, women have ``squeaked like wet rubber,'' men have brandished ``iron stalks,'' and couples have ``sweated pepper 'n' spices sweat'' or lost themselves (and the sniggering reader) in ``a commotion of grunts and squawks.''
For all its schoolmarmishness, the contest revels in the pulsating purple prose that it seeks to eliminate, with the award ceremony featuring husky-voiced actresses who read the contending passages aloud. Sting and Jerry Hall are among the celebrities who have presented the prize.
Still, the prize does beg a question: What, pray tell, constitutes good literary sex?
Why, I ask you, would a piece like the one below grab the attention of a Literotician?
A: (1) It's putting cheese in a mousetrap?
A: (2) It's catnip for a cat?
A: (3) It's putting a rabbit in front of a dog?
A: (4) It's as the flame is to a moth?
____________________________________________
No Bad Sex, Please, We're Critics:
U.K. Authors Brace for Award
By Hephzibah Anderson
Nov. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Britain's most anxiously awaited literary prize will be granted this evening, when hardworking judges present some lucky novelist with the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
Previously won by Tom Wolfe and Sebastian Faulks, the contest dishonors the author of the year's most atrociously torrid sex scene. The eight finalists for 2007 include seamy passages from the late Norman Mailer's ``The Castle in the Forest'' and Ali Smith's ``Girl Meets Boy.''
The London monthly inaugurated the annual award in 1993 ``to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.''
They have a point. Among this year's finalists, robots do it, paunchy tycoons do it, even William Shakespeare, clinging to Anne Hathaway's ``heaving haunches,'' does it.
The contest pits Mailer's incestuous Hitler clan and Smith's earthly embodiment of the mythical Iphis against the lusty automaton in Jeanette Winterson's ``The Stone Gods,'' a Russian oligarch in Gary Shteyngart's ``Absurdistan,'' and the breathless Bard in Christopher Rush's ``Will.''
Other finalists included Clare Clark, whose heroine becomes ``unhooked by longing'' in ``The Nature of Monsters.'' Richard Milward made the cut with ``Apples,'' whose quaking young hero turns out to be all talk and no sizzle. And who could resist actor David Thewlis's ``The Late Hector Kipling,'' about an artist who dabbles in S&M?
`Spasms and Snaps'
(The hero endures a poultice of hot dripping wax and cold lager before the core of his soul ``spasms and snaps, spilling out its filthy pips.'')
Gleefully billed as ``Britain's most dreaded literary prize,'' the award was dreamed up by critic Rhoda Koenig and enthusiastically inaugurated by the magazine's late editor, Auberon Waugh.
Waugh's own father, Evelyn Waugh, was no stranger to steamy scenes: Witness the passage in ``Brideshead Revisited'' where narrator Charles Ryder recalls his moment of bliss between the ``narrow loins'' of Julia Mottram, sister of his close friend Sebastian Flyte.
Anyone can suggest a specimen of tacky sex that merits the award. The only prize for the winning author is an abstract statuette depicting what the Literary Review calls ``sex in the 1950s.''
Wolfe Fights Back
Most recipients blush and bear the dubious media exposure with good grace, though Wolfe and Faulks both declined to receive their laurels in person. Wolfe even struck back at the judges, claiming that they had failed to understand the deliberate irony in his winning scenes from ``I Am Charlotte Simmons.''
A fixture in London's literary calendar, the award is routinely invoked by reviewers warning readers off squirm- inducing works. Pornographic or expressly erotic works are excluded from the contest. Yet the judging panel, which consists of Literary Review staff, always finds plenty to choose from.
In previous years, women have ``squeaked like wet rubber,'' men have brandished ``iron stalks,'' and couples have ``sweated pepper 'n' spices sweat'' or lost themselves (and the sniggering reader) in ``a commotion of grunts and squawks.''
For all its schoolmarmishness, the contest revels in the pulsating purple prose that it seeks to eliminate, with the award ceremony featuring husky-voiced actresses who read the contending passages aloud. Sting and Jerry Hall are among the celebrities who have presented the prize.
Still, the prize does beg a question: What, pray tell, constitutes good literary sex?
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