LitHub Daily: December 11, 2015

TODAY: In 1922, Grace Paley (née Goodside), writer and political activist, is born in The Bronx. 

• A brief, wondrous history of Arabic literature. | Literary Hub
• Notes from a Bookseller Under Pressure: on selling things that aren’t books in a bookstore. | Literary Hub
• The Top Books of 2015, as decided by Michiko Kakutani, Dwight Garner, and Janet Maslin. | The New York Times
• “Many of our self-styled Christian leaders would do well to seek out ‘The Displaced Person.’” On the lingering relevance of Flannery O’Connor’s least-anthologized story. | The Paris Review
• We Should All be Feminists, and we should all read these eight other essential feminist texts. | The Guardian
• Taking on the two “extreme views about punctuation” and quelling the moral panic about texting: An interview with linguist David Crystal. | The New Yorker
• Appropriative poetry may be protected by free speech, but is it actually accomplishing anything productive? (No.) | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Justin Taylor reviews John Wieners’s selected poems and selected journals, suggests we burn a small fire and fall in love. | Electric Literature
• “This is not a world for love poems.” RIP, love poems. | Harriet
• Literary Wonder Women and magical human beings: 18 of 2015’s biggest literary advocates. | Entropy

Also on Literary Hub: Elaine Sciolino on one perfectly imperfect street in Paris · Koons Crooks’s Iterating Grace in 10 quotes · From Marie-Helene Bertino’s 2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas, out in paperback

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