Blue Britannia

The UK Literary Review’s shortlist for the annual Bad Sex in Fiction award is out, and what better way to start the week than some lame fucking? The winning loser will be announced November 30 and receive a plaster foot. Which, we imagine, fits perfectly in the Stinque Award’s Crystal Shoe.

• “I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg.” (Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones)
• “She took my head in both hands and guided it downward, between her fragrant thighs. ‘Yoni puja — pray, pray at my portal.'” (Paul Theroux, A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta)
• “The green cock plunged in and out of the abundant naked body sprawled beneath it, slow at first, then faster and harder, then harder still, and all of Tracy’s curves and hollows moved in unison with it. This was not soft porn.” (Philip Roth, The Humbling)

• “It is exactly as he imagined it — the hair, the lips, the hole — and he slips his hands under her wasted buttocks and enters her like a fucking pile driver.” (Nick Cave, The Death of Bunny Munro)
• “Bobby starts scrabbling frantically across the carpet for Mr Condom, sending five or six multicolour Durexes flying through the air, and he struggles getting the packet open and Georgie has to roll Mr Condom down Mr Penis for him and she has to help insert him into Mrs Vagina.” (Richard Milward, Ten Storey Love Song)
• “They conduct there, on that white bed, under the rubied iron cross, a fair imitation of a passionate dalliance, a repeated toing and froing on the edge of a precipice beyond which can be glimpsed a dark-green distance in a reeking mist and something shining out at them, a pulsing point of light, peremptory and intense.” (John Banville, The Infinities)
• “And so, in complete self-denial — in every sense — with his fingers, now experienced and even inspired, he starts to steer her enjoyment like a ship towards its home port, to the deepest anchorage, right to the core of her pleasure.” (Amos Oz, Rhyming Life and Death)
• “They were not in tune and it was as if he were splashing about helplessly on the shore of some great ocean, waiting for a current, or the right swimming stroke to sweep him effortlessly out to sea.” (Sanjida O’Connell, The Naked Name of Love)
• “After, we kept very still, like the only two roots of the forest.” (Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter)
• “I have begun meeting with some of the best minds in the country that believe in limited government, maximum freedom and the values of our Founders. I am developing a 100 year plan.”

Damn, that’s what we get for outsourcing our research to Fox News — that last example of screwing the audience is from Glenn Beck, and not eligible for an award.

The bad sex factor: extracts from the prize shortlist [Guardian UK]