Yesterday the Literary Review announced the shortlist for their annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award; a list that includes a rock star, a Nobel Prize favorite, and of course, Philip Roth.
Roth (photo by Nancy Crampton, via HMH) was nominated for a racy scene in “The Humbling.” Oz, the gamblers’ former favorite for the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, was nominated for “Rhyming Life and Death.” Rock star Nick Cave earned his nod for “The Death of Bunny Munro,” and his publisher told the Guardian they were pleased with the shortlist appearance.
Here’s a particularly juicy passage from a previous nominee, “The Whole World Over” by Julia Glass. “And then before her inner eye, a tide of words leaped high and free, a chaotic joy like frothing rapids: truncate, adjudicate, fornicate, frivolous, rivulet, violet, oriole, orifice, conifer, aquifer, allegiance, alacrity … all the words this time not a crowding but a heavenly chain … a release of something deep in the core of her altered brain, words she thought she’d lost for good.”
The complete list is after the jump, via the Guardian…
The complete shortlist
Paul Theroux for A Dead Hand
Nick Cave for The Death of Bunny Munro
Philip Roth for The Humbling
Jonathan Littell for The Kindly Ones
Amos Oz for Rhyming Life and Death
John Banville for The Infinities
Anthony Quinn for The Rescue Man
Simon Van Booy for Love Begins in Winter
Sanjida O’Connell for The Naked Name of Love
Richard Milward for Ten Storey Love Song