And now for something completely different:

British author, Rowan Somerville, has been awarded the annual “Bad Sex in Fiction Prize,” for his stunning use of animal and insect imagery in his novel, The Shape of Her.  Judges said they were especially impressed by a passage comparing lovemaking to “a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect.”

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2010-11-29-bad-sex-in-fiction-prize_N.htm

Somerville, who beat out such luminaries as Jonathan Franzen, noted during the award ceremony that, “There is nothing more English than bad sex.”   The Shape of Her is not yet available in this country, although I suspect Amazon.UK could ship in time for a holidays.

Rowan Somerville joins an select group of past winners, which includes Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and the late John Updike, who was awarded a “lifetime achievement bad sex prize in 2008.”

Last year’s winner was Jonathan Littell for his novel, The Kindly Ones, in which he described the sex act as “a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg.”

Show, don’t tell in action…