Wednesday Linkstorm

Happy Birthday this week to Gay Talese, J.M. Coetze, and Charles Dickens. The three amigos!Boffo fiction sensation The Art of Fielding was born in a log cabin in the woods of Illinois to poor but proud farmers. Learn about its birth in this ebook by n+1 editor Keith Gessen. This week's Book Bench has an interview with Michael Chabon.For Anglophiles/cinephiles/Thatcherites: 2011 Booker winner Julian Barnes on The Iron Lady over at the New York Review of Books. Uh oh, Zeitoun of Dave Eggers fame pleads guilty to domestic abuse. Timothy Donnelly wins the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Congrats! Local fun: Up and comers Liz Moore and Alex Gilvarry read from their new novels Heft and From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant at Porter Square Books in Cambridge on Friday night.Wao your Valentine (sorry) with tickets to see Junot Diaz at the The Lowell Humanities Series and Fiction Days at Boston College next week. It's free.--Erin Somers