It doesn’t matter how good or bad the quality, quantity, length, satisfaction levels, or innovativeness of the act there is no denying that sex sells. Look at the Fifty Shades trilogy, it is the consensus that the writing was mediocre at best and at worst promoted abusive relationships and yet it has catapulted its author into the literary hall of fame and forever raised erotic literature out of the gutters and into the hands of everyone and anyone.
I’m not sure how the authors who have been nominated feel about their work appearing in this list but here are the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award finalists for 2016.
Taken from their website:
“Each year since 1993, the Bad Sex in Fiction Award has honoured an author who has produced an outstandingly bad scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel. The purpose of the prize is to draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction. The prize is not intended to cover pornographic or expressly erotic literature.”
The Award was established by Rhoda Koenig, a literary critic, and Auberon Waugh, at that time editor of Literary Review.”
Here are the finalists and a small excerpt of the scene that has seen them nominated.
A Doubter’s Almanac – Ethan Canin
The act itself was fervent. Like a brisk tennis game or a summer track meet, something performed in daylight between competitors. The cheap mattress bounced. She liked to do it more than once, and he was usually able to comply. Bourbon was his gasoline. Between sessions, he poured it at the counter while she lay panting on the sheets. Sweat burnished her body. The lean neck. The surprisingly full breasts. He would down another glass and return.
Men Like Air – Tom Connolly
The walkway to the terminal was all carpet, no oxygen. Dilly bundled Finn into the first restroom on offer, locked the cubicle door and pulled at his leather belt. “You’re beautiful,” she told him, going down on to her haunches and unzipping him. He watched her passport rise gradually out of the back pocket of her jeans in time with the rhythmic bobbing of her buttocks as she sucked him. He arched over her back and took hold of the passport before it landed on the pimpled floor. Despite the immediate circumstances, human nature obliged him to take a look at her passport photo.
The Day Before Happiness – Erri De Luca
She pushed on my hips, an order that thrust me in. I entered her. Not only my prick, but the whole of me entered her, into her guts, into her darkness, eyes wide open, seeing nothing. My whole body had gone inside her. I went in with her thrusts and stayed still. While I got used to the quiet and the pulsing of my blood in my ears and nose, she pushed me out a little, then in again. She did it again and again, holding me with force and moving me to the rhythm of the surf. She wiggled her breasts beneath my hands and intensified the pushing. I went in up to my groin and came out almost entirely. My body was her gearstick.
The Butcher’s Hook – Janet Ellis
When his hand goes to my breasts, my feet are envious. I slide my hands down his back, all along his spine, rutted with bone like mud ridges in a dry field, to the audacious swell below. His finger is inside me, his thumb circling, and I spill like grain from a bucket. He is panting, still running his race. I laugh at the incongruous size of him, sticking to his stomach and escaping from the springing hair below.
Leave Me – Gayle Forman
Once they were in that room, Jason had slammed the door and devoured her with his mouth, his hands, which were everywhere. As if he were ravenous.
And she remembered standing in front of him, her dress a puddle on the floor, and how she’d started to shake, her knees knocking together, like she was a virgin, like this was the first time. Because had she allowed herself to hope, this was what she would’ve hoped for. And now here it was. And that was terrifying.
Jason had taken her hand and placed it over his bare chest, to his heart, which was pounding wildly, in tandem with hers. She’d thought he was just excited, turned on.
It had not occurred to her that he might be terrified, too.
The Tobacconist – Robert Seethaler
He closed his eyes and heard himself make a gurgling sound. And as his trousers slipped down his legs all the burdens of his life to date seemed to fall away from him; he tipped back his head and faced up into the darkness beneath the ceiling, and for one blessed moment he felt as if he could understand the things of this world in all their immeasurable beauty. How strange they are, he thought, life and all of these things. Then he felt Anezka slide down before him to the floor, felt her hands grab his naked buttocks and draw him to her. “Come, sonny boy!” he heard her whisper, and with a smile he let go.
Other authors to receive a mention in The Literary Review’s Bad Sex award Finalists list include Ian McEwan, Eimear McBride and Jonathan Safran Foer whose novel Here I Am caught the judges’ eye with lines such as: ‘He jerked off with the determination of someone within sight of Everest’s summit, having lost all his friends and Sherpas, having run out of supplemental oxygen, but preferring death to failure.’ but sadly they didn’t quite manage to make the final cut.
It is good to remember that these small excerpts are not representative of the entire book and these novels are well worth reading, just don’t expect to be titillated when nookie is imminent.
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