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Books: Funny Sad Girl

TODDLER ON THE RUN by Shena Mackay. 105 pages. Simon & Schusfer. $2.95.

Author Mackay, a 21-year-old British girl who shares a drab walk-up over a London launderette with her 23-year-old draftsman husband, an infant daughter, her mother, a dog and three sullen cats is the most precocious and prolific ornament in a new British literary clique that might be called the Sad Young Girls. Unlike the Angry Young Men, who exercised their spleens against a rotten and unjust world, the Sad Young Girls find the world deliciously sad—and despairing about it is a...

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RAY KELLY, New York City Police Commissioner, on the arrest of a New Jersey man in one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases, the disappearance more than three decades ago of 6-year-old Etan Patz.
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