Wednesday Linkstorm

Sunday is Tennessee Williams' birthday you guys. Come over to my house for make your own sundaes and an impromptu performance of A Streetcar Named Desire w/ you as Stanley Kowalski!Zany old Vlad Putin is at it again. He proposed a new literary canon of 100 books that all Russians will be required to read. And if they don't, the Thought Police will get em.This is your brain. This is your brain on fiction [delicious egg sizzles in frying pan]. ANY QUESTIONS???In hilarious stoner news, the feds intercepted two boxes full of eleven pounds of marijuana being mailed to New York publisher St. Martin's Press. Munchies were arriving by Fedex.The spring Paris Review is out! It's got an essay by the always excellent John Jeremiah Sullivan and new fiction from Lorrie Moore. A perfect storm of everything you love: JJS, Lorrie Moore, and perfect storms! Plus: Bret Easton Ellis on the art of fiction and poems by Adrienne Rich, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Susan Barbour, who are people, apparently.Horror king H.P. Lovecraft has been dead for 75 years. Here's a thing about that. Also, if Lovecraft's your boy, you should read this book on him by curmudgeon par excellence Michel Houellebecq. It's great stuff.Are you guys following this Mike Daisey thing? No? Get the net, jeez.Hunger Games the movie is opening this weekend. Are you camped out in front of your local theater right now? You: "Just lying in a tent outside Lowes checking in with Barnstorm on my mobile device. Normal Wednesday."--Erin Somers