LitHub Daily: November 28, 2016

• John Lewis: “Read everything. Be kind. Be bold.” In conversation with an American hero. | Literary Hub
• How pacifism can lead to violence: Miriam Toews on the dark consequences of conflict-avoidance. | Literary Hub
• Meg Elison stole her first diary, and hasn’t stopped writing since. | Literary Hub
• We talked to a dictionary: Merriam-Webster, the internet’s funniest lexicographical institution. | Literary Hub
• Open Books recommends 10 great small press titles you should spend time with this December. | Literary Hub
• The New York Times and The Guardian have named their 100 Notable Books and Best Books of 2016. | The New York Times, The Guardian
• “You barely realize what has happened and suddenly there you are, in the mid-nineteenth century on an Irish estate during the tyrannical years of the potato famine, immersed in a story of ordinary people quietly wrestling with fate.” Marisa Silver on William Trevor. | The New Yorker
• “As a refugee from Vietnam, a country the United States bombed, mined, and laced with Agent Orange for years, I have doubts about America’s core goodness.” Viet Thanh Nguyen on Henry Kissinger and American exceptionalism. | The Atlantic
• The best new old fiction: On the prose writing of Alexander Pushkin. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• On two anthologies looking at the Black Power movement, “the movement that most closely mirrors the current rise of activism, outspokenness and unabashed blackness,” on its 50th anniversary. | The New York Times
• It’s a strange kind of fetishization: On the literary pairing of madness and artistry. | The Times Literary Supplement
• “Although there are bleak times ahead, we must remember that for most of us America was never paradise.” A reading list for our current political climate. | The New Inquiry

Also on Lit Hub: Al-Qarawiyyin, the world’s oldest library: founded by a woman, restored by a woman · Three poems by Pat Parker · Street tales from the City of Lights.