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Philip Roth nominated for dubious honor
Posted by: Claude Peck under Books, Awards Updated: December 1, 2009 - 4:15 PM
Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Awards have been handed out to some top names, including Salman Rushdie, Tom Wolfe, John Updike and Ian McEwan, but a passage from one of this year's nominees, Philip Roth in "The Humbling," is a real cringer:
"It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be. She could as well have been a crow or a coyote...."
And here's another charmer from Paul Theroux's "A Dead Hand":
"Her hands were all over me, four hands it seemed, or more than four, and as she touched she made me weightless, lifting me off the table in a prolonged ritual of levitation."
The winning passage, from Jonathan Littel's "The Kindly Ones," can't be printed here. Go to www.literaryreview.co.uk if you simply must read it.
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