Bad Sex Writing Prize Goes to Tom Wolfe

Mon Dec 13, 9:44 PM ET

LONDON - It's the literary award no author wants to win, and this year it's gone to Tom Wolfe. The Literary Review gave Wolfe its annual Bad Sex award Monday for his best-selling novel "I Am Charlotte Simmons."

Judges said the book's sex scenes were "ghastly ... inept ..(and) unrealistic."

The nearly 700-page novel is set at fictional Dupont University in Pennsylvania, chronicling the bright, naive Charlotte Simmons' entry into a hedonistic world filled with heavy drinking and casual sex.

Reviews of the book have been harsh, but like most of Wolfe's work, it's selling well.


He gained fame in the 1960s with works including "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" and "The Right Stuff." "The Bonfire of the Vanities," his scathing satire of New York in the 1980s, was a top 10 best-seller of the decade.


The Bad Sex prize, in its 12th year, is intended to "draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel," its judges say.


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