Welsh, Pynchon among finalists hoping to avoid Bad Sex in Fiction Award
LONDON (AP) - Will the winner be the unfortunate canine encounter, the tryst in a blacksmiths' forge or the girl with the Space Hopper breasts?
Eight authors, including Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell and American literary maverick Thomas Pynchon, were competing Wednesday for one of the world's least-coveted literary prizes - the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
Rocker
Courtney Love was recruited to announce the winner at a London ceremony.
Now in its 14th year, the award was established by Literary Review magazine to celebrate truly cringe-worthy erotic writing.
"It's mixed metaphors, embarrassing fumbling. It's the redundancy of the scene in an otherwise good novel," said assistant editor Philip Womack.
Judges say the award's mandate is "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it."
In the latter aim, it has failed. This year's crop of finalists includes passes as lurid and ludicrous as any in memory.
Tim Willcocks' medieval action novel "The Religion" features a scene in which characters grapple passionately in a forge "across the cold steel face of the anvil."
"In the pit of his stomach a cauldron boiled and some seething and nameless brew rose up through his spine and filled his brain with the Devil's Fire," Willcocks writes.
Mitchell's 1980s coming-of-age story "Black Swan Green" has been praised by critics. But Bad Sex judges were drawn to a passage in which one character's breasts are compared to "a pair of Danishes" and another's to "two Space Hoppers."
Pynchon's long-awaited, 1,000-page novel "Against the Day" is nominated for a scene involving a spaniel that ends: "Reader, she bit him."
Mark Haddon, the bestselling author of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time," is nominated for his description of rapture in his latest novel, "A Spot of Bother" - "Images went off in her head like little fireworks. The smell of coconut. Brass firedogs."
The other finalists are Scottish writer Irvine Welsh's "Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs"; Julia Glass' "The Whole World Over"; Iain Hollingshead's "Twentysomething"; Michael Cannon's "Lachlan's War"; "Tourism" by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal; and Will Self's "The Book of Dave."
Winners receive a "semiabstract statuette representing Sex in the 1950s" and a bottle of champagne - but only if they show up at the ceremony. In the past, most have.
"It's a very jolly affair," Womack said. "It's not meant to humiliate."
Last year's winner was food critic and novelist Giles Coren for a memorable passage comparing a male character's genitalia to a shower hose.
In 2004, the prize went to Tom Wolfe's novel "I Am Charlotte Simmons" for sex scenes the judges called "ghastly ... inept ... (and) unrealistic."
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Excerpts:
The Religion by Tom Willcocks
"[he] bent her across the the cold steel face of the anvil....she called out to God and convulsed with each slow stroke, her head thrown back and her eyelids aflutter, and her cries filled the forge...." Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
"Now she made a noise like a tortured Moomintroll..." Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
"Ruperta had trained her toy spaniel to provide intimate 'French' caresses of the tongue for the pleasure of its mistress....Reef followed, taking out his penis, breathing heavily through his mouth. 'Here Mouffie, nice big dog bone for you right here...." 
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