A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that Amos Oz and Philip Roth were in contention for this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award, given by the Literary Review to mock erotic fumblings in print. The two giants ultimately lost out to their literary junior, New York-born Jonathan Littell, for a scene in his Holocaust novel, The Kindly Ones.
Littell, son of spy novelist Robert Littell, doesn’t define himself as Jewish, according to Ha’aretz, and he’s not kindly towards Israel, which he thinks does “atrocious” things to the Palestinians.