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Fortune Smiles: Stories, by Adam Johnson
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NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER | WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE | LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST | A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK | NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, USA TODAY, AND MIAMI HERALD | NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • NPR • Marie Claire • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • BuzzFeed • The Daily Beast • Los Angeles Magazine • The Independent • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his acclaimed novel about North Korea, The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson is one of America’s most provocative and powerful authors. Critics have compared him to Kurt Vonnegut, David Mitchell, and George Saunders, but Johnson’s new book will only further his reputation as one of our most original writers. Subtly surreal, darkly comic, both hilarious and heartbreaking, Fortune Smiles is a major collection of stories that gives voice to the perspectives we don’t often hear, while offering something rare in fiction: a new way of looking at the world.
In six masterly stories, Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal. “Nirvana,” which won the prestigious Sunday Times short story prize, portrays a programmer whose wife has a rare disease finding solace in a digital simulacrum of the president of the United States. In “Hurricanes Anonymous”—first included in the Best American Short Stories anthology—a young man searches for the mother of his son in a Louisiana devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. “George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine” follows a former warden of a Stasi prison in East Germany who vehemently denies his past, even as pieces of it are delivered in packages to his door. And in the unforgettable title story, Johnson returns to his signature subject, North Korea, depicting two defectors from Pyongyang who are trying to adapt to their new lives in Seoul, while one cannot forget the woman he left behind.
Unnerving, riveting, and written with a timeless quality, these stories confirm Johnson as one of America’s greatest writers and an indispensable guide to our new century.
Praise for Fortune Smiles
“Masterful . . . Each [story] is a miniature demonstration of why his remarkable novel The Orphan Master’s Son won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.”—The Washington Post
“[Johnson] is always perceptive and brave; his lines always sing and strut and sizzle and hush and wash and blaze over the reader.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Superb . . . explosive.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Remarkable . . . the best short story collection since Tenth of December . . . Johnson is one of America’s greatest living writers.”—The Huffington Post
“Haunting, harrowing . . . Johnson’s writing is as rich in compassion as it is in invention, and that rare combination makes Fortune Smiles worth treasuring.”—USA Today
“[Blends] exotic scenarios, morally compromised characters, high-wire action, rigorously limber prose, dense thickets of emotion, and, most critically, our current techno-moment.”—The Boston Globe
“Johnson’s boundary-pushing stories make for exhilarating reading.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Entrancing.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
From the Hardcover edition.
- Sales Rank: #13036 in Books
- Published on: 2016-10-04
- Released on: 2016-10-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .70" w x 5.20" l, .81 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
Review
“Masterful . . . Each [story] is a miniature demonstration of why his remarkable novel The Orphan Master’s Son won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.”—The Washington Post
“[Adam Johnson] is always perceptive and brave; his lines always sing and strut and sizzle and hush and wash and blaze over the reader.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Superb . . . explosive.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Remarkable . . . the best short story collection since Tenth of December . . . Johnson is one of America’s greatest living writers.”—The Huffington Post
“Haunting, harrowing . . . Johnson’s writing is as rich in compassion as it is in invention, and that rare combination makes Fortune Smiles worth treasuring.”—USA Today
“Fortune Smiles [blends] exotic scenarios, morally compromised characters, high-wire action, rigorously limber prose, dense thickets of emotion, and, most critically, our current techno-moment.”—The Boston Globe
“Johnson’s boundary-pushing stories make for exhilarating reading.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Entrancing.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
“One of the most original and compelling voices in contemporary American fiction.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Johnson packs more voice in his stories than most authors do in a novel.”—Esquire
“Stunning . . . Johnson is a writer of uncanny insight and compassion and Fortune Smiles is a wise, poignant and important book. It should not be missed.”—Toronto Star
“The best stories stretch well beyond their first and last words. They’re more than the opening scene; they invite the reader to imagine what came before and what will come after. They’re alive and they’re limitless. That’s exactly what the best stories in Fortune Smiles are like.”—NPR
“[A] bold and deeply wise collection.”—BuzzFeed
“Even as Johnson’s subject matter bends genre is a way that is assertively contemporary, much of his prose is classically beautiful. . . . The speculative fiction of Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell, which also trade in inherited traumas and personal resilience, come to mind, as do George Saunders’ darkly satiric visions of near-future America.”—The New Republic
“Transfixing . . . The collection amply confirms Johnson’s daring and talent.”—The Oregonian
“Excellent.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Johnson has a rare combination of inventiveness, intellectual pyrotechnics and emotional sophistication. . . . These stories are treasures.”—BBC
“Adam Johnson returns with this riveting collection of short stories, each reflecting the darkly imagined, slightly surreal point of view that animated his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Orphan Master’s Son. . . . He’s a compelling writer, in any form.”—San Jose Mercury-News
“Startlingly, blazingly original.”—BookPage
“[Adam Johnson] serves up six sinewy stories that shock and surprise in his edgy, inviting Fortune Smiles. . . . [They’re] compulsively readable tales about characters whose lives are largely ignored, undervalued, or simply uncharted and whose voices we seldom hear.”—Elle
“The stories in Fortune Smiles fizz with imagination, miniature worlds exploding onto the page. Adam Johnson’s prose is so pared-down, like the setting for precious stones, he gives us just what’s necessary to let the facets sparkle, without distraction. I loved this book!”—M. L. Stedman, New York Times bestselling author of The Light Between Oceans
“How do you follow a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel? For [Adam] Johnson, the answer is a story collection, and the tales are hefty and memorable. . . . In the title story, two North Korean criminals adjust to post-defection life in South Korea. . . . Often funny, even when they’re wrenchingly sad, the stories provide one of the truest satisfactions of reading: the opportunity to sink into worlds we otherwise would know little or nothing about.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A half-dozen sometimes Carver-esque yarns that find more-or-less ordinary people facing extraordinary challenges and somehow holding up. Tragedy is always close to the surface in Johnson’s work—with tragicomic layerings. . . . Bittersweet, elegant, full of hard-won wisdom: this is no ordinary book, either.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Adam Johnson is the author of The Orphan Master’s Son, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the California Book Award, and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was named one of the best books of the year by more than a dozen publications, including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and Entertainment Weekly. Johnson’s other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Stegner Fellowship; he was also a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award. His previous books are Emporium, a short story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us. Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco with his wife and children.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
It’s late, and I can’t sleep. I raise a window for some spring Palo Alto air, but it doesn’t help. In bed, eyes open, I hear whispers, which makes me think of the president, because we often talk in whispers. I know the whispering sound is really just my wife, Charlotte, who listens to Nirvana on her headphones all night and tends to sleep-mumble the lyrics. Charlotte has her own bed, a mechanical one.
My sleep problem is this: when I close my eyes, I keep visualizing my wife killing herself. More like the ways she might try to kill herself, since she’s paralyzed from the shoulders down. The paralysis is quite temporary, though good luck trying to convince Charlotte of that. She slept on her side today, to fight the bedsores, and there was something about the way she stared at the safety rail at the edge of the mattress. The bed is voice-activated, so if she could somehow get her head between the bars of the safety rail, “incline” is all she’d have to say. As the bed powered up, she’d be choked in seconds. And then there’s the way she stares at the looping cable that descends from the Hoyer Lift, which swings her in and out of bed.
But my wife doesn’t need an exotic exit strategy, not when she’s exacted a promise from me to help her do it when the time comes.
I rise and go to her, but she’s not listening to Nirvana yet—she tends to save it for when she needs it most, after midnight, when her nerves really start to crackle.
“I thought I heard a noise,” I tell her. “Kind of a whisper.”
Short, choppy hair frames her drawn face, skin faint as refrigerator light.
“I heard it, too,” she says.
In the silver dish by her voice remote is a half-smoked joint. I light it for her and hold it to her lips.
“How’s the weather in there?” I ask.
“Windy,” she says through the smoke.
Windy is better than hail or lightning or, God forbid, flooding, which is the sensation she felt when her lungs were just starting to work again. But there are different kinds of wind.
I ask, “Windy like a whistle through window screens, or windy like the rattle of storm shutters?”
“A strong breeze, hissy and buffeting, like a microphone in the wind.”
She smokes again. Charlotte hates being stoned, but she says it quiets the inside of her. She has Guillain-Barré syndrome, a condition in which her immune system attacks the insulation around her nerves so that when the brain sends signals to the body, the electrical impulses ground out before they can be received. A billion nerves inside her send signals that go everywhere, nowhere. This is the ninth month, a month that is at the edge of the medical literature. It’s a place where the doctors no longer feel qualified to tell us whether Charlotte’s nerves will begin to regenerate or she will be stuck like this forever.
She exhales, coughing. Her right arm twitches, which means her brain has attempted to tell her arm to rise and cover the mouth. She tokes again, and through the smoke she says, “I’m worried.”
“What about?”
“You.”
“You’re worried about me?”
“I want you to stop talking to the president. It’s time to accept reality.”
I try to be lighthearted. “But he’s the one who talks to me.”
“Then stop listening. He’s gone. When your time comes, you’re supposed to fall silent.”
Reluctantly, I nod. But she doesn’t understand. Stuck in this bed, having sworn off TV, she’s probably the only person in America who didn’t see the assassination. If she’d beheld the look in the president’s eyes when his life was taken, she’d understand why I talk to him late at night. If she could leave this room and feel the nation trying to grieve, she’d know why I reanimated the commander in chief and brought him back to life.
“Concerning my conversations with the president,” I say, “I just want to point out that you spend a third of your life listening to Nirvana, whose songs are by a guy who blew his brains out.”
Charlotte tilts her head and looks at me like I’m a stranger. “Kurt Cobain took the pain of his life and made it into something that mattered. What did the president leave behind? Uncertainties, emptiness, a thousand rocks to overturn.”
She talks like that when she’s high. I tap out the joint and lift her headphones.
“Ready for your Nirvana?” I ask.
She looks toward the window. “That sound, I hear it again,” she says.
At the window, I peer out into the darkness. It’s a normal Palo Alto night—the hiss of sprinklers, blue recycling bins, a raccoon digging in the community garden. Then I notice it, right before my eyes, a small black drone, hovering. Its tiny servos swivel to regard me. Real quick, I snatch the drone out of the air and pull it inside. I close the window and curtains, then study the thing: its shell is made of black foil stretched over tiny struts, like the bones of a bat’s wing. Behind a propeller of clear cellophane, a tiny infrared engine throbs with warmth.
“Now will you listen to me?” Charlotte asks. “Now will you stop this president business?”
“It’s too late for that,” I tell her, and release the drone. As if blind, it bumbles around the room. Is it autonomous? Has someone been operating it, someone watching our house? I lift it from its column of air and flip off its power switch.
Charlotte looks toward her voice remote. “Play music,” she tells it.
Closing her eyes, she waits for me to place the headphones on her ears, where she will hear Kurt Cobain come to life once more.
I wake later in the night. The drone has somehow turned itself on and is hovering above my body, mapping me with a beam of soft red light. I toss a sweater over it, dropping it to the floor. After making sure Charlotte is asleep, I pull out my iProjector. I turn it on, and the president appears in three dimensions, his torso life-size in an amber glow.
He greets me with a smile. “It’s good to be back in Palo Alto,” he says.
My algorithm has accessed the iProjector’s GPS chip and searched the president’s database for location references. This one came from a commencement address he gave at Stanford back when he was a senator.
“Mr. President,” I say. “I’m sorry to bother you again, but I have more questions.”
He looks into the distance, contemplative. “Shoot,” he says.
I move into his line of sight but can’t get him to look me in the eye. That’s one of the design problems I ran across.
“Did I make a mistake in creating you, in releasing you into the world?” I ask. “My wife says that you’re keeping people from mourning, that this you keeps us from accepting the fact that the real you is gone.”
The president rubs the stubble on his chin. He looks down and away.
“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” he says.
Which is eerie, because that’s a line he spoke on 60 Minutes, a moment when he expressed regret for legalizing drones for civilian use.
“Do you know that I’m the one who made you?” I ask.
“We are all born free,” he says. “And no person may traffic in another.”
“But you weren’t born,” I tell him. “I wrote an algorithm based on the Linux operating kernel. You’re an open-source search engine married to a dialog bot and a video compiler. The program scrubs the Web and archives a person’s images and videos and data—everything you say, you’ve said before.”
For the first time, the president falls silent.
I ask, “Do you know that you’re gone . . . that you’ve died?”
The president doesn’t hesitate. “The end of life is another kind of freedom,” he says.
The assassination flashes in my eyes. I’ve seen the video so many times—the motorcade slowly crawls along while the president, on foot, parades past the barricaded crowds. Someone in the throng catches the president’s eye. The president turns, lifts a hand in greeting. Then a bullet strikes him in the abdomen. The impact bends him forward, his eyes lift to confront the shooter. A look of recognition settles into the president’s gaze—of a particular person, of some kind of truth, of something he has foreseen? He takes the second shot in the face. You can see the switch go off—his limbs give and he’s down. They put him on a machine for a few days, but the end had already come.
I glance at Charlotte, asleep. “Mr. President,” I whisper, “did you and the first lady ever talk about the future, about worst-case scenarios?”
I wonder if the first lady was the one to turn off the machine.
The president smiles. “The first lady and I have a wonderful relationship. We share everything.”
“But were there instructions? Did you two make a plan?”
His voice lowers, becomes sonorous. “Are you asking about bonds of matrimony?”
“I suppose so,” I say.
“In this regard,” he says, “our only duty is to be of service in any way we can.”
My mind ponders the ways in which I might have to be of service to Charlotte.
The president then looks into the distance, as if a flag is waving there.
“I’m the president of the United States,” he says, “and I approved this message.”
That’s when I know our conversation is over. When I reach to turn off the iProjector, the president looks me squarely in the eye, a coincidence of perspective, I guess. We regard each other, his eyes deep and melancholy, and my finger hesitates at the switch.
“Seek your inner resolve,” he tells me.
Can you tell a story that doesn’t begin, it’s just suddenly happening? The woman you love gets the flu. Her fingers tingle, her legs go rubbery. Soon she can’t grip a coffee cup. What finally gets her to the hospital is the need to pee. She’s dying to pee, but the paralysis has begun: the bladder can no longer hear the brain. After an ER doc inserts a Foley catheter, you learn new words—axon, areflexia, ascending peripheral polyneuropathy.
Charlotte says she’s filled with “noise.” Inside her is a “storm.”
The doctor has a big needle. He tells Charlotte to get on the gurney. Charlotte is scared to get on the gurney. She’s scared she won’t ever get up again. “Please, honey,” you say. “Get on the gurney.” Soon you behold the glycerin glow of your wife’s spinal fluid. And she’s right. She doesn’t get up again.
Next comes plasmapheresis, then high-dose immunoglobulin therapy.
The doctors mention, casually, the word ventilator.
Charlotte’s mother arrives. She brings her cello. She’s an expert on the siege of Leningrad. She has written a book on the topic. When Charlotte’s coma is induced, her mother fills the neuro ward with the saddest sounds ever conceived. For days, there is nothing but the swish of vent baffles, the trill of vital monitors, and Shostakovich, Shostakovich, Shostakovich.
Two months of physical therapy in Santa Clara. Here are dunk tanks, sonar stimulators, exoskeletal treadmills. Charlotte becomes the person in the room who makes the victims of other afflictions feel better about their fate. She does not make progress, she’s not a “soldier” or a “champ” or a “trouper.”
Charlotte convinces herself that I will leave her for one of the nurses in the rehab ward. She screams at me to get a vasectomy so this nurse and I will suffer a barren future. To soothe her, I read aloud Joseph Heller’s memoir about contracting Guillain-Barré syndrome. The book was supposed to make us feel better. Instead, it chronicles how great Heller’s friends are, how high Heller’s spirits are, how Heller leaves his wife to marry the beautiful nurse who tends to him. And for Charlotte, the book’s ending is particularly painful: Joseph Heller gets better.
We tumble into a well of despair that’s narrow and deep, a place that seals us off. Everything is in the well with us—careers, goals, travel, children—so close that we can drown them to save ourselves.
Finally, discharge. Yet home is unexpectedly surreal. Amid familiar surroundings, the impossibility of normal life is amplified. But the cat is happy, so happy to have Charlotte home that it spends an entire night curled on Charlotte’s throat, on her tracheal incision. Goodbye, cat! While I’m in the garage, Charlotte watches a spider slowly descend from the ceiling on a single thread. She tries to blow it away. She blows and blows, but the spider disappears into her hair.
Still to be described are tests, tantrums and treatments. To come are the discoveries of Kurt Cobain and marijuana. Of these times, there is only one moment I must relate. It was a normal night. I was beside Charlotte in the mechanical bed, holding up her magazine.
She said, “You don’t know how bad I want to get out of this bed.”
Her voice was quiet, uninflected. She’d said similar things a thousand times.
“I’d do anything to escape,” she said.
I flipped the page and laughed at a picture whose caption read, “Stars are just like us!”
“But I could never do that to you,” she said.
“Do what?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“What are you talking about, what’s going through your head?”
I turned to look at her. She was inches away.
“Except for how it would hurt you,” she said, “I would get away.”
“Get away where?”
“From here.”
Neither of us had spoken of the promise since the night it was exacted. I’d tried to pretend the promise didn’t exist, but it existed.
“Face it, you’re stuck with me,” I said, forcing a smile. “We’re destined, we’re fated to be together. And soon you’ll be better, things will be normal again.”
“My entire life is this pillow.”
“That’s not true. You’ve got your friends and family. And you’ve got technology. The whole world is at your fingertips.”
By friends, I meant her nurses and physical therapists. By family, I meant her distant and brooding mother. It didn’t matter: Charlotte was too disengaged to even point out her nonfunctional fingers and their nonfeeling tips.
She rolled her head to the side and stared at the safety rail.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I would never do that to you.”
Most helpful customer reviews
77 of 80 people found the following review helpful.
Fortune Grimaces
By Ann Elliot
When this book appeared on the list of Vine possibilities, I jumped on it. The way my life has been going recently, I could use a little hope and cheer. The title sounded like just what I needed.
That will teach me to choose a book without doing any research first.
In the book, Fortune Smiles is the name of a rigged North Korea-based lottery game.
The six stories feature a woman paralyzed and in the throes of Guillain-Barre syndrome, a man fighting his compulsion to molest little girls, a woman with breast cancer, a UPS driver dealing with personal crises and the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, a former Stasi warden of a notorious prison for political prisoners in what was East Berlin and two men who rather accidentally defected from North Korea to South Korea, where they trade a totalitarian regime for the equally not-subtle indoctrination of glitzy capitalism and proselytizing Christianity.
Fortune hasn't smiled on any of these characters, unless she is enjoying some very cruel pranks.
I avidly read all the stories anyway. Johnson is a highly skilled writer who pulls the reader into unfamiliar territory and unfolds a good bit of social commentary.
I even finished the story about child molesters, although my stomach was churning as I read.
One of my favorites was "Interesting Facts," the one narrated by a woman with breast cancer. It was deftly written--so much so that I stopped part way through and reread to see how Johnson had led me down the path he wished without my seeing what he was doing.
I also enjoyed "Hurricanes Anonymous" because, really, who could not like a young Cajun UPS driver who keeps delivering packages while accompanied by his 2-year-old son Geronimo in spite of the ravages of hurricanes Katrina and Rita? His deliveries to the zombielike refugees living in a former Chuck E. Cheese stayed with me for days.
The writing kept me reading. This is not a book everyone will want to read. In fact, I'm not sure I wanted to read it, but I'm glad I did.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A Universe of Imagination
By Fairbanks Reader - Bonnie Brody
I love to read short story collections and I usually don't connect with every story included. It was not different with this book. However, there were some stories that knocked me for a loop with their intelligence, subtlety and outright outrageousness. Adam Johnson is a wordsmith, a man with an imagination as big as the universe, a post-modernist and a traditionalist, a writer for all seasons.
The first story in the collection, 'Nirvana' is about a woman with Guillain-Barre syndrome. She is paralyzed by the disease and spends most of her waking time listening to Kurt Cobain. Her husband is a free source computer genius who has been able to bring to life a past president of the United States who has been assassinated in the past. He is able to talk to the president and the president answers him but only with phrases he's actually used when he was alive. Both husband and wife have experienced great loss and as the husband states, "This feeling of being in proximity to something that's lost to you, it seems like my whole life right now".
'Interesting Facts' is a story close to my heart. A young woman with children is going through treatment for breast cancer and the treatment is brutal. She often wonders what her husband would do should she succumb to the disease. What is particularly interesting, besides the narrative itself, is that the woman's husband has won a Pulitzer prize for a novel about North Korea, and he gets invited to all these functions with beautiful women. She worries if one of them will seduce him. I wonder how much of the author's real life is contained in this story.
There's a story of a UPS driver who 'inherits' a child after Hurricane Katrina, a story about an ex-Stasi prison guide, as well as a few others in this collection. They are all well-written and interesting. It is the above two, however, that spoke most personally to me.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Short stories admittedly aren’t my favorite thing to read
By Jessica Weil
Short stories admittedly aren’t my favorite thing to read. I often find they are anticlimactic or that they feel unfinished, and I can’t help but have a difficult time pouring myself into a story that I know will end so quickly. But Adam Johnson’s short story collection, Fortune Smiles, won the National Book Award, so I had a feeling I was in store for something special, and I was anything but disappointed.
The stories – distinctly melancholy, darkly funny, bleak and sometimes surreal – are thematically consistent: they’re about lonely people facing extraordinary challenges.
In Nirvana, a man’s wife has been stricken with Guillain-Barre syndrome, her entire body paralyzed for the past nine months. Struggling with his wife’s illness and her threat of suicide, he develops a program that allows him to speak to the hologram of a recently deceased president, and takes solace in his new confidant.
In Hurricanes Anonymous, a directionless young father takes care of his son in post-Katrina New Orleans.
In Interesting Facts, the ghost of a woman who died of breast cancer visits her family and worries about her husband moving on.
In George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine, a former Stasi prison warden is in denial about the atrocities committed under his watch, and eerily attempts to justify and rationalize torture as a necessary part of a functioning society.
In Dark Meadows – perhaps one of the most harrowing and disturbing stories I’ve ever read – a non-offending pedophile who himself was abused as a child helps the police track child pornography cases and finds himself looking after two neglected young girls in his neighborhood.
And finally, in Fortune Smiles, a man who defected from North Korea struggles to adapt to life in South Korea and dreams of returning to his home country.
The problem with many short story collections is that they are uneven. While some of the stories take hold of you, others are immediately forgettable. But with Fortune Smiles, almost every single story had me captivated – with the exception, perhaps, of Hurricanes Anonymous. If you enjoy short stories, don’t miss this collection. And even if you typically don’t, give it a try anyway.
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