A Supernova of Bad Sex? Manil Suri Wins Uncoveted Award The novelist and mathematician Manil Suri has been long-listed for the Booker Prize and short-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award. But on Tuesday he finally came in first, when his novel "The City of Devi" took home the Literary Review's annual Bad Sex in Fiction Prize. The award, given since 1993 for the "most egregious passage of sexual description in a novel," was presented by Joan Collins at a ceremony at the In & Out Club, an apparently respectable establishment in the Mayfair section of London. Other contenders included Eric Reinhardt's "Victoria System" ("The zip of her skirt sputtered between her fingernails like a motorboat on a waveless sea"), Susan Choi's "My Education" (and how!), and Woody Guthrie's posthumous novel "House of Earth," which includes plenty of hillbilly hookups. But the judges, apparently in a more cosmic mood, swooned for Mr. Suri's descriptions of astral coitus in Mumbai during a nuclear showdown between India and Pakistan, singling out a passage in which a physicist, his wife and another character take a ride in the erotic equivalent of a supercollider. "Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy," Mr. Suri, 54, a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, wrote. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands - only Karun's body, locked with mine, remains. We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice. Actual physicists, however, were a bit less celebratory. "In the throes of passion, supernovas and quarks are very far from the mind of the average physicist," Sean M. Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, said via email. But the idea that statisticians the world over are rejoicing is somehow heartening (or insulting, depending on what they were calculating the statistics of). Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was more direct, saying, "I'd rather be forced to grade 100 statistical mechanics exams than be forced to read this book."