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    • Lit Guide
      An Abduction
      by Tessa Hadley
      Jane Allsop, a 15-year-old girl from an upper-middle-class family in Surrey, England, is home from boarding school for summer vacation. She feels oppressed by the sunny weather because it means her mo
    • Poetry Guide
      Dockery and Son
      by Philip Larkin
      In "Dockery and Son," Philip Larkin takes a characteristically bleak look at a midlife crisis. The poem's speaker, a middle-aged Englishman, attends a memorial service for his old university friend Do
    • Lit Guide
      Before the Coffee Gets Cold
      by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
      In a tiny, out-of-the-way café in Tokyo called Funiculi Funicula, waitress Kazu Tokita and regular customer Yaeko Hirai listen to Fumiko Kiyokawa tell the story of her recent breakup. Two weeks earlie
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