Melville House Books

After winning this year’s Bad Sex in Literature award from what he called a “very small, rather old-fashioned magazine,” Tom Wolfe says, “There’s an old saying — ‘You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her sing’. In this case, you can lead an English literary wannabe to irony but you can’t make him get it.” What’s more, according to a Guardian repo rt by Dan Glaister, “Rejecting criticisms that he was the first recipient of the Bad Sex award to fail to attend the prizegiving ceremony, Wolfe responded that he had not been invited. ‘I love coming to London if they would only be so kind as to invite me,’ he said. ‘I have not heard a word from them. Ask them how they wrote me. What form? Cleft stick?’”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.