Norman Mailer Wins a Dubious Literary Prize

Maybe it’s a good thing Norman Mailer is not alive to personally receive this particular prize. He is the 2007 winner of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award for the most awkward description of an intimate encounter. The Literary Review, a British magazine, started the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards in 1993 to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it”. Previous winners include Sebastian Faulks and Tom Wolfe.