“A smiling, diverse lie of face paint and broken dreams.”

io9 offers up “The Twenty Science Fiction Novels that Will Change Your Life,” from Frankenstein to Pattern Recognition. (via)Cathleen Schine on the charms of Peter CareyThe “Thomas Bernhard cult” claims a new initiate.F.O.T.M. (Friend of The Millions) Lydia Millet talks about “endangered species, the idea of motherhood, and her stint at Hustler.””Why do scribblers make drinking their second art? For one thing, it primes them for their task.” Writers and booze.Some American Studies undergrads at The University of Virginia have put together an online exhibit titled “The New Yorker Magazine in the 1930s.”NPR’s “In Character” segment considers Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne.

At the New Statesman, Jeanette Winterson reflects on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which she celebrates as both a work of fantasy and a “savage satire on sexism.”

This thoroughly entertaining conversation between Robert Birnbaum and Arthur Phillips is not to be missed. Topics include faking Shakespeare, beagles, being anti-social in Brooklyn, pilates, and writing for a living.

“I have always had faith that the best writers will rise to the top, like cream, sooner or later, and will become exactly as well known as they should be—their work talked about, quoted, taught, performed, filmed, set to music, anthologized. Perhaps, with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves.” An excerpt from Lydia Davis‘s foreword to Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories is now online.

Recommended reading: Joseph Scapellato summarizes the life of a young writer for Electric Lit. “You are a young writer. Write.”