Need to bone up on your literary terms? These may not help you impress your agent… but they make her laugh!

Harper’s posts an exerpt from Chris Offutt’s “The Offutt Guide to Literary Terms”

Faves:

memoir: From the Latin memoria, meaning “memory,” a popular form in which the writer remembers entire passages of dialogue from the past, with the ultimate goal of blaming the writer’s parents for his current psychological challenges.

novel: A quaint, longer form that fell out of fashion with the advent of the memoir.

short story: An essay written to conceal the truth and protect the writer’s family.

novel-in-stories: A term invented solely to hoodwink the novel-reading public into inadvertently purchasing a collection of short fiction.