the perils of the (literary) naughty bits

This is all over the place, but the Guardian has posted the longlist for the annual Literary Review Bad Sex (in fiction) Award, and it's--as their headline says--a stiff competition. Some passages seem fairly harmless, if mildly seedy and overblown, and at least one--Christine Aziz's--strikes me as undeserving of inclusion at all. But most of them are astonishing. A demon eel thrashing in his loins? Zorro? Lobster? The worst ones, incidentally, are all about fellatio. I don't know why so many Pulitzer/Booker/Nobel/etc laureates (and wannabes) can't write a simple, unembarrassing account of cocksucking. Or just refrain from writing about it at all.

I'm trying to come up with some examples of good lit-fic sex scenes (i.e., hot, funny, startling, or just plain good writing--including good writing about bad sex)...Rushdie's on the longlist this year for a scene in Shalimar, but I rather like the Cochin-spice-warehouse "transcendental fuck" of Moor's Last Sigh; John Banville's The Untouchable has some vivid and surprising moments, various parts of Jeanette Winterson's oeuvre are worthy of mention, and A. S. Byatt's deft, amusing human-and-djinn coupling (in Istanbul, no less!) in The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye is one of my all-time favourites. Oh, and Mohja Kahf's awesome Sex and the Umma stories. On the whole, though, more poetry than prose comes to mind.

(via pretty much everybody, but the babu's digested read is hysterical)