Philip Roth on Bad Sex Award Shortlist

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

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