Oh Henry!

My friend David tells me I must SHOUT THIS TO THE WORLD~ world, are you listening?

From NERVE.com:

NERVE.com will be nominating The Bitch Posse for their May Henry Miller literary award for the best literary sex scene and will run a short excerpt from the book on the site (with a "buy this book" link to Amazon.)

{My mom, who reads my blog, is hoping now that she maybe misread something~that it's The Arthur Miller Award I've been nominated for, not The Henry Miller Award. *SIGH* Sorry, Mom...}

NERVE.com receives 1.2 million monthly unique visitors who are primarily single 21-34 year-olds best described as young, urban, over-educated hipsters.

For Miller, the early-twentieth century writer known for his unprecedented sexual candor, writing explicitly about sex was less about a desire to shock than it was about a need to present complete stories. More than seven decades later, eyebrow-raising depictions of sex in fiction are hardly unusual. However, honest literary sex scenes capable of "resuscitating the body and soul" are surprisingly rare.

With that in mind, every month Nerve will present you with five nominees for our monthly Henry Miller Award. These scenes, ranging from three hundred to five hundred words in length, will be excerpted from new fiction that we feel should be sought out on the merit of these passages alone. Which of these five passages paints the most complete picture? Which one most successfully evokes the myriad sensations and emotions that accompany sex? Which one incites the most visceral response? You decide by rating each passage on three equally weighted criteria: literary value, hotness and originality. The winner will be posted in four weeks along with next month's nominees. Each month's highest-ranked entry will proceed to the year-end competition. Two winners of that contest will be announced: grand prize (as chosen by a panel of a celebrity judges) and readers' choice. The judges' pick will receive $1,934, commemorating the publication date of Tropic of Cancer.

Here are this month's nominees~

Home Land by Sam Lipsyte

Paradise by A.L. Kennedy

Milk by Darcy Steinke

The Position by Meg Wolitzer

Beautiful Blemish by Kevin Sampsell

It goes without saying that if you click the link above, YOU WILL BE TAKEN TO A SITE WHERE YOU WILL READ FIVE SCENES THAT WERE NOMINATED FOR A HENRY MILLER AWARD. If you do not like to read material like this, then do not click, you silly goose!

I admire these writers and their work, and it is my great honor to have my work put in a class with theirs. As I was getting ready to submit The Bitch Posse to agents I said to another, well-known writer that I couldn't have reached the emotional depths I did with the novel had I not turned off all the censors. That was true of Miller as well.

"Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end."~Henry Miller

I do not yet know which excerpt they are using.... I will post a link here when the excerpt appears so you can go and vote for it, presuming you think it is deserving.

And speaking of Ole Henry, I have heard speculation that Marilyn Monroe would have been happier had she married Henry Miller instead of Arthur. What do YOU think?