Charts & Graphs

A Decade of Impotent Prose

Winners of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

  • 1998: Sebastian Faulks, Charlotte Gray

    “ ‘Dominique,’ he breathed, ‘this is so wonderful I feel I might disintegrate; I might break into a million fragments.’ ”

  • 1999: A.A. Gill, Starcrossed

    “She got to his cock and stuck it between her teeth like a cigar...”

  • 2001: Christopher Hart, Rescue Me

    “Her hand is moving away from my knee and heading north. Heading unnervingly and with a steely will toward the pole.”

  • 2003: Aniruddha Bahal, Bunker 13

    “You want her more at a Volkswagen’s steady trot. Squeeze the maximum mileage out of your gallon of gas. But she’s eating up the road with all cylinders blazing. You lift her out. You want to try different kinds of fusion.”

  • 2004: Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons

    “The fingers went under the elastic of the panties moan moan moan moan moan went Hoyt as he slithered slithered slithered slithered and caress caress caress caress went the fingers until they must be only eighths of inches from the border of her pubic hair—what’s that!”

  • 2005: Giles Coren, Winkler

    “As she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands and he shot three more times, in thick stripes on her chest. Like Zorro.”

  • 2007: Norman Mailer, The Castle in the Forest

    “His mouth lathered with her sap, he turned around and embraced her face with all the passion of his own lips and face, ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety.”