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Bad Sex in Fiction award 2013: Manil Suri
Bad Sex in Fiction award 2013: Manil Suri's subatomic bisexual orgy in The City of Devi beats hillbilly humping to award
Adam Sherwin
An ecstatic bisexual orgy, which climaxes against a backdrop of imminent nuclear annihilation, has secured the prized Bad Sex in Fiction award for Manil Suri and his novel, The City of Devi.
The Indian-born author joins Sebastian Faulks, Melvyn Bragg and Tom Wolfe among the pantheon of writers recognised by the Literary Review for producing the ?most egregious passage of sexual description in a novel.
Suri triumphed over authors including William Nicholson, who said he was ashamed to have been shortlisted and Woody Guthrie, the Depression-era folk singer whose posthumously-published novel House of Earth featured ripe descriptions of hillbilly humping.
However The City of Devi, set in Mumbai as the city is locked-down under the threat of a nuclear bomb, best satisfied the instruction, first laid down in 1993, to single out the crude, badly written, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.
The novel follows three characters: Sarita, her physicist husband Karun, who has disappeared, and Jaz, a young gay Muslim. The judges were won over by the diffusion of sexual ecstasy through time, space and consciousness at the climax of an extended sex scene involving all three characters.
It reads: Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands only Karuns body, locked with mine, remains. 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.
The City of Devi prevailed over strong competition. Susan Choi came close with My Education (I seemed to come right away, with a hard, popping effervescence, as if her mouth had raised blisters, or an uppermost froth; but beneath, magma still heaved and groaned and was yearning to fling itself into the air).
Guthries House of Earth was an early favourite (And as she sucked the last drops of his blood and his seed into the folds of her innermost soul and self, she felt her whole body lift, pull, squeeze, then lift again, tremble, shake, and quiver, and in her fires of her stomach she strained and moved to bathe his blood into the rumble and the thunder of her own.); whilst Eric Reinhardt?s The Victoria System briefly set pulses racing (The zip of her skirt sputtered between her fingernails like a motorboat on a waveless sea My erection beat time in my underwear.)
Bad Sex in Fiction award 2013: Manil Suri's subatomic bisexual orgy in The City of Devi beats hillbilly humping to award
Adam Sherwin
An ecstatic bisexual orgy, which climaxes against a backdrop of imminent nuclear annihilation, has secured the prized Bad Sex in Fiction award for Manil Suri and his novel, The City of Devi.
The Indian-born author joins Sebastian Faulks, Melvyn Bragg and Tom Wolfe among the pantheon of writers recognised by the Literary Review for producing the ?most egregious passage of sexual description in a novel.
Suri triumphed over authors including William Nicholson, who said he was ashamed to have been shortlisted and Woody Guthrie, the Depression-era folk singer whose posthumously-published novel House of Earth featured ripe descriptions of hillbilly humping.
However The City of Devi, set in Mumbai as the city is locked-down under the threat of a nuclear bomb, best satisfied the instruction, first laid down in 1993, to single out the crude, badly written, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.
The novel follows three characters: Sarita, her physicist husband Karun, who has disappeared, and Jaz, a young gay Muslim. The judges were won over by the diffusion of sexual ecstasy through time, space and consciousness at the climax of an extended sex scene involving all three characters.
It reads: Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands only Karuns body, locked with mine, remains. 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.
The City of Devi prevailed over strong competition. Susan Choi came close with My Education (I seemed to come right away, with a hard, popping effervescence, as if her mouth had raised blisters, or an uppermost froth; but beneath, magma still heaved and groaned and was yearning to fling itself into the air).
Guthries House of Earth was an early favourite (And as she sucked the last drops of his blood and his seed into the folds of her innermost soul and self, she felt her whole body lift, pull, squeeze, then lift again, tremble, shake, and quiver, and in her fires of her stomach she strained and moved to bathe his blood into the rumble and the thunder of her own.); whilst Eric Reinhardt?s The Victoria System briefly set pulses racing (The zip of her skirt sputtered between her fingernails like a motorboat on a waveless sea My erection beat time in my underwear.)
