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By Leah Greenblatt

Dear readers,

I pulled an old favorite novel from the shelf recently, and a ghost fell out. Not an actual ectoplasm but a small cream-colored card, the lost artifact of a summer fling with a glamorous Spaniard whose chaotic charms were never meant to last past August. (Reader, I ended it at a busy crosswalk and was on the subway back to Brooklyn before the next light changed: over, as they say, in a New York minute.)