So magnified and so keen were her feelings that her inner nerves could even feel the bumps, the ridges, the pimples, the few stray hairs along the shaft of his male rod.
That was so awful, I can't even bring myself to make a pun of Guthrie's first name. Still, the famous folk singer is far from this year's only offender. "The Victoria System" by Eric Reinhardt contains this cringe-worthy sample:
"Look," she was saying, "look at my breasts. I want to show them to you. I hope you like them. They’re for you. I’m giving them to you."
And her chest appeared before my eyes like a slow-motion shot of a natural phenomenon in a television documentary.
Really? I mean … really? Even the most terrible porn actress on her very first day on the job could ad-lib something better than "I'm giving them to you." That's not sexy. It's not even accurate. It's not as if he gets to take the boobs with him to enjoy later in the day. They're not freaking restaurant leftovers! The idea of giving a nice rack the ol' Ken Burns camera shot treatment is intriguing. But what might make for a compelling stag movie doesn't necessarily (or ever) translate into great literature.
That's bad. But it was Manil Suir who took the prize this year for his novel "The City of Devi," especially this passage:
We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice.
How ... romantic.
The Bad Sex in Fiction Award was established in 1993 by Auberon Waugh, the son of novelist/journalist Arthur Evelyn Waugh. Literary Review insists that the award is not meant to be mean or catty. Its stated purpose is to bring attention to "crude, badly written, or perfunctory use of passages of sexual description … and to discourage it." That sounds like a very noble cause to me.