The time has come for the literary world to move well beyond the terms “chick lit” and “lad lit” and add more literary pejoratives to the lexicon. After all, if we can’t find a way to take the piss out of every book turned out by the publishers, how can the literary world be counted upon to sustain its vitriol? Crouch-Peck altercations in restaurants simply aren’t cutting it these days. The book review sections continue to play it safe. The time has come to step up the enmity with a brand new set of ad hominen terminology!

What follows is a running list of terms with which to flood your blogs, your essays, your literary cocktail party banter and your term papers with. Feel free to add your suggestions in the comments.

• Brit Lit: Any novel published by the Granta 20 authors. Should be used as a pejorative particularly when the author is very friendly (e.g., Sarah Waters and David Mitchell).
• Clit Lit: Any steamy but ultimately banal memoir relying upon explicit description of sexual conquests to boost sales. (Example: Toni Bentley’s The Surrender.)
• Corp Lit: A bland memoir ostensibly penned by a former CEO, but actually ghost-written by someone else, often masquerading as a self-help book or a source of empowerment. (See Jack Welch’s oeuvre.)
• Geezer Lit: Any novel that is published to placate a Very Important Author along the lines of Mailer, Updike or Roth. Ideally, the book features an affluent protagonist over 50 who is (a) going through a midlife crisis, (b) having an extramarital affair, or (c) living in a spacious New England home.
• Thick Lit: Novels that are ridiculously long and are announced by publishers as “a major literary event.” (See Paul Anderson’s Hunger’s Brides and Suzanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.) Also applies to more credible long-winded novelists along the lines of David Foster Wallace and William T. Vollmann.
• Trick Lit: Novels that frame or recontextualize their stories through a common tale or mythology because the novelist can’t come up with anything particularly original on his own. (See Gregory Maguire.)
• Wonk Lit: Any memoir or political volume published by a former politician. Often, wonk lit titles are desperate ploys to restore credibility and/or standing with a public who has rapidly forgotten of the ex-politician in question. (Examples: Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Gary Hart’s Restoration of the Republic.)

B to B Online: “With declining circulation, a relatively flat ad market and sluggish stock prices, some analysts say the writing is on the wall for newspaper companies. In an increasingly digital age, newspapers must decide what content is better suited for online than print. Marketers say the trend is accelerating. The ongoing shifts of print content to online ‘is the tip of the iceberg,’ said Stephen Carlson, associate media director at StarLink Worldwide, whose clients include the American Medical Association and Caterpillar Inc. He added that TV listings, entertainment listings, sports statistics and weather reports might be in line to be eliminated from newspapers.”

Could book review sections be next?

Nicholas Spice on Everyman: “Everyman has none of this propulsive linguistic exuberance [identified in previous books]. Its energy is of a quite different kind. It is a funerary portrait, a short account of a man’s life cast in the bias of a preoccupation with bodily decay. The story is told in retrospect, the mood is valedictory and morose. Most stories we read or listen to are told in the past tense, but we forget this and experience them as though they were happening now; wondering what happens next is what keeps our attention. In Everyman nothing happens next, not just because the protagonist is buried in the opening scene, but because what we learn of his life comes to us mainly through what he remembers.”

Thomas Mallon on Harper Lee: “More troublesome than the dialogue, Lee’s narrative voice is a wildly unstable compound, a forced mixture—sometimes in the same sentence—of Scout’s very young perspective and a fully adult one. Phrases like ‘throughout my early life’ and ‘when we were small’ serve only to jar us out of a past that we’ve already been seeing, quite clearly, through the eyes of the little girl. Information that has been established gets repeated, and the book’s sentences are occasionally so clumsy that a reader can’t visualize the action before being asked to picture its opposite: ‘A flash of plain fear was going out of [Atticus’s] eyes, but returned when Dill and Jem wriggled into the light.'”

Houston Chronicle: “‘When college is over, you’ll think about it for the rest of your life,’ he said Saturday. Grisham joked that adulthood is overrated, and said professional life is stressful and unhealthy. One solution, he said, is to stay in school.”

Let me set John Grisham, Esquire straight. The telltale sign that Jay Gatsby is one unbearably sad dude:

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”