Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and John Updike have all taken it home in the past, and now author Rowan Somerville has won this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Prize for his novel The Shape of Her. (This may come as a relief to Jonathan Franzen, who was also nominated.) Which of Somerville’s overwrought sexual descriptions did the Literary Review–convened panel single out? Why, “Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her,” of course. (Bonus points for another of the novel’s ooky similes, which describes a woman’s nipple that is “upturned like the nose of the loveliest nocturnal animal.” An owl? A bat? We’re a little freaked out right now.) [Yahoo, Telegraph UK]
