Lit Hub Daily: December 4, 2018

•  “This is how Woolf often treats the celestial domain: as idyllic, inhuman, and other.” On Virginia Woolf’s astronomical obsession. | Lit Hub
• “What began with sharing prose to call forth this vulnerable, natural world opened the space for the same in our personal lives.” When scientists start a writing group. | Lit Hub
• Need a break from all the valedictory recommendations? Here are the books we’re looking forward to in December. | Lit Hub
• From Sula to Swing Time, Jacqueline Mroz on her favorite novels about female friendship. | Lit Hub
• “Art is a language not just of growth and change but of reinvention and recycling.” On the 19th-century art historian who anticipated the Abstract art of the 20th century. | Lit Hub
• The creepy, the cool, and the ultra-modern: all the best crime and mystery book covers of 2018, as selected by the CrimeReads editors. | CrimeReads
• The Feral Detective author Jonathan Lethem recommends five books with reverse-gender first-person narrators. | Book Marks
• Our roundup of the Best Reviewed Books of 2018 continues with essay collections and short stories. | Book Marks
• With her book Well-Read Black Girl, Glory Edim shines a light on black women writers. | WNYC
• As national media outlets expand, so does their book coverage. | Columbia Journalism Review
• New imprint alert: Polis Books is launching the “diversity-focused” Agora Books, which will publish crime and noir fiction. | Publisher’s Weekly
• “Dear Elena Ferrante: It’s been a while.” An open letter to everyone’s favorite Neapolitan novelist—whatever her real name is. | The Atlantic
• For your holiday reading list: 50 of the best LGBT books of 2018. | Autostraddle
• “The result of a Brazilian literature without a fundamental role for black writers leaves a huge gap not only in the literature of the country itself but in literature globally.” On Afro-Brazilian writers, past and present. | Words Without Borders
• Good news for lovers of dark, atmospheric prestige television: Starz is adapting Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series. | Vanity Fair

Also on Lit Hub: Read from Cats or Katz, or How Jesus Became My Rival in Love • “Grenfell Tower, June 2017“, a poem by Ben Okri • Preti Taneja on So Many Damn Books, with Christopher Hermelin and Drew Broussard