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29 November 2009updated 29 Jun 2018 11:53am

The Bad Sex Awards

Philip Roth's "masturbatory fantasy" is favourite to take the prize

By Jonathan Derbyshire

I’ll be attending the Literary Review’s annual “Bad Sex in Fiction Award” ceremony tomorrow night. You can see the shortlist, which is limited to “redundant passges of sexual description” from “literary novel[s]”, as opposed to “pornographic or expressly erotic literature”, here.

The smart money is on Philip Roth’s novella The Humbling, described by Jason Cowley, in his review of it for the NS, as “an old man’s masturbatory fantasy” with “all the aesthetic surprise of the latest upload on YouPorn”.

I’ll report on the outcome on Tuesday morning.

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