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On Crowley’s latest

Levi Stahl, impressed with John Crowley’s World War II-era novel, Four Freedoms, calls it “an elegy for an America that never quite was.”

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Isaac Newton, P.I.

Newton and the Counterfeiter examines Isaac Newton’s late-life gig as a criminal investigator. (Via.)

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The lives — and books — of teenage girls

Today at The Second Pass, Emma Garman returns to Françoise Mallet-Joris’ The Illusionist and Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, two compelling and remarkably amoral novels narrated — and written — by teenage girls in the middle of the last century. The Illusionist centers on the protagonist’s affair with her father’s mistress, while Bonjour Tristesse involves the heroine’s “plan of sexual deception . . .

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