Here are the top five links from Prufrock for the week. Enjoy!

1. Neglected books you should read (I second Toomer’s Cane and Melville’s Confidence Man. Not familiar with the others. Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance is mostly ignored, but I like it. I’d add J.F. Powers’s Morte d’Urban and Gabriele d’Annunzio’s Notturno–awful politics, terrible person, beautiful writer. I would also add Eugenio Montale’s slim La poesie non esiste (“Poetry does not exist”), but I haven’t been able to find it in English, though it has been translated into French. Other suggestions?)

2. Wikipedia’s decline

3. Are epics a divine gift?

4. You don’t want to be a writer

5. The great American baseball novel