CarnalNation

"Hoyt began moving his lips as if he were trying to suck the ice cream off the top of a cone without using his teeth. She tried to make her lips move in sync with his." 

That's a quote from Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, which in 2004 won the Bad Sex In Fiction Award, given out each November by the British magazine Literary Review.

This year, the just-announced list of nominees includes such luminaries as Philip Roth (for the old-man-seducing-the-much-younger-lesbian-with-a-green-dildo scenes in The Humbling) and musician-turned-novelist Nick Cave, whose The Death of Bunny Munro chronicles the adventures of a sex-crazed door-to-door cosmetics salesman. "Frankly we would have been offended if he wasn't shortlisted," Cave's publisher told The Guardian.

But the competition seems especially fierce this year. For instance, here's one Amazon commenter's dismissal of Jonathan Littell's nominated The Kindly Ones: "Once you've read one masturbatory, sado-sexual fantasy about having sex with your twin sister described in gynecological detail while simultaneous sticking lit candles in your rectum and enjoying the sensation of hot wax on your naked buttocks, you've read them all." Then there's Richard Milward's Ten Storey Love Song, which is named after a Stone Roses song (good) but which is also written without chapters or paragraphing (bad).

Full list of nominees after the jump:

Paul Theroux for A Dead Hand
Nick Cave for The Death of Bunny Munro
Philip Roth for The Humbling
Jonathan Littell for The Kindly Ones
Amos Oz for Rhyming Life and Death
John Banville for The Infinities
Anthony Quinn for The Rescue Man
Simon Van Booy for Love Begins in Winter
Sanjida O'Connell for The Naked Name of Love
Richard Milward for Ten Storey Love Song

The prize was started in 1993 by Literary Review editor Auberon Waugh to convince authors to avoid "unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels."