His mouth lathered with her sap, he turned around and embraced her face with all the passion of his own lips and face, ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety.
These words won Norman Mailer the prize for the most crude and tasteless depiction of a sexual act in a literary work. The Bad Sex Award, given by the UK's Literary Review, is possibly my favorite of all literary awards because it's the one that allows me to look at works for which people have been paid enormous sums of money and say, with great confidence, "I can do better than that."
The award comes at a particularly interesting time for me this year as I am at the point where I have to write a sex scene for the romantic suspense novel I'm working on, which is proving to be the challenge I knew it would be.
But even at my worst, I don't imagine I even come close to any of the short-listed passages, all of which you can find on the Manchester Guardian's site. If you haven't read the short-listed passages in previous years (the Literary Review has been doing this for fourteen years), be prepared: before clicking the link, do not sip anything you don't wish to choke on, spew, or snort through your nose.
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5 comments:
I also LOVE this award! There can be a fine line (or an abyss) between super sexy and super silly.
I ended up writing more (sort of) romance in my horror/thriller NaNo than I expected, though none of your hated cross-species kanoodling. And even though my word widget hasn't updated for some reason...as of 11-ish tonight, I made it!
I feel good and happy to put it all away for awhile. There's more to write for the full novel to be rounded, and I had to blarp up 7k today, a new personal maximum in which the quality might have reached a new minimum. Undoubtedly, there's a Maileresque Houndload of editing before it'll be usable. But the 4th time's the charm, and now I can wear something besides this stupid NaNo T-shirt.
Ha! A new one for me. Thanks for sharing.
Funny stuff. Mailer probably jsut wanted to be able to say "Unleash the hound." every time he unzipped.
I liked the first headline I saw on this award which read "Dead Writer Wins Bad Sex Award."
Well, yeah, that's understandable, isn't it?
Oh, my. This is definitely deserving of this auspicious award. I had to do a sex scene in my NaNo novel and it was one of the most difficult parts of the whole process. My guilty admission: I sacrificed 2 sentences to cliche for the word count when I was too frustrated and time stressed to get it right. Arrrrggghhhh!!! Oh well. You can bet I'll be letting my "IE" loose on that scene!
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