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LITERARY NEWS & EVENTS – art & literature news, in memoriam, festivals, city-poets, writers in Residence

«« Previous page · Nexus-symposium: An Education in Counterculture in DeLaMar Theater Amsterdam · Literair-historische Tijdschrift: De Parelduiker (2018/1). Hoezo natuur? · Roswitha Mair: Käthe Kollwitz. Ein Leben gegen jede Konvention · Julian Barnes: The Only Story (Novel) · My Name Is Venus Black. A Novel by Heather Lloyd · Sophie Collins: Who Is Mary Sue? · Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems · Heimo Schwilk: Rilke und die Frauen. Biografie eines Liebenden · Robert Lowell: New Selected Poems · sam sax: madness (poetry) · The Unaccompanied. Poems by Simon Armitage · Kathryn Harkup: Making the Monster. The Science Behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

»» there is more...

Nexus-symposium: An Education in Counterculture in DeLaMar Theater Amsterdam

Counterculture, die term muntte socioloog Theodore Roszak voor de maatschappelijke revolte in de zestiger jaren. De hoofdstad van deze tegencultuur was New York. Eerst als broedplaats voor nieuwe visies op de kunst, het leven en de wereld: de poëzie van de Beatgeneration; de muziek van Bob Dylan; seks, drugs en rock-’n-roll. Maar later ook als strijdperk voor de Burgerrechtenbeweging, het verzet tegen de oorlog in Vietnam en tegen een materialistische, autoritaire samenleving.

Zangeres en schrijfster Patti Smith, haar gitarist en rock-’n-roll-historicus Lenny Kaye, en Dylan-biograaf Sean Wilentz – wiens vader de boekhandel 8th Street Books bestierde, waar de Beatgeneration van Allen Ginsberg opbloeide – beleefden, vormden en beschreven deze bijzondere jaren.

Een middag lang vertellen zij, aan de hand van beelden en muziek, het verhaal over wat het was en wat het voor ons nu nog kan betekenen: An Education in Counterculture.

Patti Smith
Verenigde Staten, 1946, zangeres, dichteres en ‘Godmother of Punk’
Patti Smith is zangeres en dichteres. Als ‘Godmother of Punk’ protesteerde zij met krachtige, controversiële muziek tegen de gevestigde orde en wezenloze fabrieksarbeid in de vercommercialiseerde wereld. Ze groeide op met de muziek van Bob Dylan, leefde samen met fotograaf Robert Mapplethorpe en werd een bekend gezicht in de turbulente New Yorkse kunstscene.
In 1974 begon Smith op te treden met gitarist Lenny Kaye, met wie ze nog steeds de kern van de band The Patti Smith Group vormt. Haar debuutalbum Horses (1975) wordt gezien als een van de invloedrijkste albums in de geschiedenis van de rockmuziek. Samen met Bruce Springsteen schreef ze Because the Night, haar grootste hit. Naast vele albums schreef Smith ook dichtbundels en boeken, waaronder Just Kids (2010), haar bekroonde autobiografie over het leven in New York in de jaren zeventig en haar relatie met Mapplethorpe.

Lenny Kaye
Verenigde Staten, 1946, gitarist, componist en schrijver
Lenny Kaye is gitarist, componist en schrijver. Als jonge zanger en gitarist toerde en speelde hij met verschillende bands en werkte hij als journalist voor Amerikaanse muziekbladen. Begin jaren zeventig ontmoette hij Patti Smith in de platenzaak in New York waar hij werkte. Kaye maakte elf albums met The Patti Smith Group en speelde ook in de Jim Caroll Band en Lenny Kaye Connection. Daarnaast werkte hij samen met vele andere prominente musici en artiesten, waaronder Allen Ginsberg, R.E.M. en Suzanne Vega. Momenteel werkt hij aan zijn boek Lightning Striking, over de geschiedenis van de rock-’n-roll. In 2011 werd Kaye geridderd tot Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Sean Wilentz
Verenigde Staten, 1951, historicus en biograaf van Bob Dylan
Sean Wilentz is schrijver en hoogleraar Amerikaanse geschiedenis aan Princeton. Zijn vader Eli Wilentz was eigenaar van 8th Street Bookshop, het literaire middelpunt van New York in de jaren vijftig en zestig. Zo groeide Wilentz op tussen grootheden van de Beatgeneration zoals Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg en William S. Burroughs, die de boekhandel geregeld bezochten. Wilentz studeerde aan Columbia en Oxford, en promoveerde aan Yale. Zijn bekendste werken zijn het monumentale The Rise of American Democracy (2005); The Age of Reagan (2008); en Bob Dylan in America (2010), over Dylans plaats in de Amerikaanse cultuurgeschiedenis. Wilentz is huishistoricus van de officiële site van Bob Dylan, en schrijft geregeld voor onder meer The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review en Dissent.

An Education in Counterculture
Nexus-symposium
26 mei 2018
13.30 – 17.30
DeLaMar Theater Amsterdam

# meer informatie website Nexus-symposium

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Literair-historische Tijdschrift: De Parelduiker (2018/1). Hoezo natuur?

De Parelduiker pakt het thema van de Boekenweek op en stelt de vraag: hoezo natuur?

In dit themanummer naar aanleiding van de Boekenweek vier verhalen over schrijvers en kunstenaars die ieder een ‘andere’ kant van de natuur leerden kennen.

Joris van Casteren volgde de voetsporen van Gerard Bilders (1838-1865). In het vieze Amsterdam ging deze jonge schrijver en landschapsschilder op tragische wijze ten onder. Tot op zijn sterfbed, in een benauwd pand aan een stinkende gracht, hunkerde hij naar de natuur en het buitenleven.

Madelon de Keizer schrijft over Albert Verwey. Anders dan diens vriend Willem Kloos, die het bij de stad en zijn verlokkingen hield, koos Verwey na zijn huwelijk met Kitty van Vloten voor een leven dichter bij de natuur en stichtte met haar een gezin in een huis op een duin te Noordwijk. Zij zetten zich in voor het herstel van de band tussen mens en natuur, die door de verstedelijking teloor dreigde te gaan.

Nescio bezong, zo schrijft biografe Lieneke Frerichs, onbezorgd de schoonheid van zomerse glooiende korenvelden, terwijl hij met zijn dochters door Noord-Frankrijk fietste.

Willem van Toorn ten slotte zette zich op initiatief van kunstschilder Willem den Ouden in voor zorgvuldige, vernuftiger dijkverbeteringen die het Nederlandse rivierenlandschap zoveel mogelijk zouden sparen, aldus Marco Daane. Hij laat zien dat Van Toorns betrokkenheid hierbij ook sporen heeft achtergelaten in zijn literaire werk.

In memoriam Jaap Harten en Menno Wigman.

De Parelduiker is een uitgave van Uitgeverij Bas Lubberhuizen – Johannes Vermeerstraat 63 – 1071 DN Amsterdam – Postbus 15511 – 1001 NA Amsterdam – T 020 5706 100

# Voor meer informatie zie de website van de parelduiker

boekenweek 2018
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Roswitha Mair: Käthe Kollwitz. Ein Leben gegen jede Konvention

Sie gilt als Künstlerin des sozialen Elends und der schmerzlichen Tragik des Krieges – Käthe Kollwitz.

Fröhlich, unkonventionell, sinnlich, neugierig – all das ist sie Zeit ihres Lebens. Immer wieder bricht Kollwitz mit gängigen Konventionen. So reist die Mutter von zwei Kindern etwa 1904 alleine nach Paris – eigentlich undenkbar zu dieser Zeit -, um die Kunst des plastischen Gestaltens zu lernen. Dort trifft sie u.a. auf Rodin.

Als zu Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges ihr Sohn ums Leben kommt, beherrscht dieses Trauma über viele Jahre ihr Leben wie auch ihre Kunst.1919 wird sie als erste Frau Professorin an der Preußischen Akademie der Künste, bis nach Hitlers Machtergreifung ein dunkler Schatten über das Land zieht und sich auch auf ihr Leben legt.

Eine tiefgründige Romanbiografie, die das außergewöhnliche Leben dieser beeindruckenden Künstlerin facettenreich einfängt.

Roswitha Mair, Dr. phil., ist Kunsthistorikerin und lebt in Innsbruck. Zahlreiche Veröffentlichungen und Beiträge zur Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts sowie Organisation und Konzeption von Kunstausstellungen.

Roswitha Mair :
Käthe Kollwitz.
Ein Leben gegen jede Konvention.
Romanbiografie
‘Herder Spektrum Taschenbücher’
Herder Verlag GmbH
Juni 2017
231 Seiten
Kartoniert – Broschiert
Sprache: Deutsch
€16,00
EAN: 9783451069734
ISBN: 3451069733

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Julian Barnes: The Only Story (Novel)

The brilliant new novel from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending. Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.

First love has lifelong consequences, but Paul doesn’t know anything about that at nineteen. At nineteen, he’s proud of the fact his relationship flies in the face of social convention.

As he grows older, the demands placed on Paul by love become far greater than he could possibly have foreseen.
Tender and profound, The Only Story is an achingly beautiful novel by one of fiction’s greatest mappers of the human heart.

Julian Barnes is the author of twelve novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. He has also written three books of short stories, four collections of essays and two books of non-fiction, Nothing to be Frightened Of and the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life. In 2017 he was awarded the Légion d’honneur.

 

 

“Most of my friends were far-flung, and –
by some unexpressed but clear parental mandate –
use of the telephone was discouraged.
A letter, and then a letter in reply.
It was all slow-paced, and lonely.”

from: The Only Story

 

Julian Barnes is the author of twelve novels, includingThe Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. He has also written three books of short stories, Cross Channel, The Lemon Table and Pulse; four collections of essays; and two books of non-fiction, Nothing to be Frightened Of and the Sunday Times Number One bestseller Levels of Life. He lives in London.

“A novel that quietly sinks its hooks into the reader and refuses to let go.” – The Times

Julian Barnes
The Only Story
Novel
Hardback, £16.99
224 pages
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
01 February 2018
ISBN: 9781787330696

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My Name Is Venus Black. A Novel by Heather Lloyd

In this riveting, heartfelt debut, a young woman assumes a new name to escape her dark past and find the redemption she desperately seeks.

“A terrific debut, told gently, honestly, and with a generous amount of hope.”—New York Times bestselling author Jamie Ford

Venus Black is a straitlaced A student fascinated by the study of astronomy—until the night she commits a shocking crime that tears her family apart and ignites a media firestorm. Venus refuses to talk about what happened or why, except to blame her mother. Adding to the mystery, Venus’s developmentally challenged younger brother, Leo, goes missing.

More than five years later, Venus is released from prison with a suitcase of used clothes, a fake identity, and a determination to escape her painful past. Estranged from her mother, and with her beloved brother still missing, she sets out to make a fresh start in Seattle, skittish and alone. But as new people enter her orbit—including a romantic interest and a young girl who seems like a mirror image of her former lost self—old wounds resurface, and Venus realizes that she can’t find a future while she’s running from her past.

In this gripping story, debut novelist Heather Lloyd brilliantly captures ordinary lives thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Told through a constellation of captivating voices, My Name Is Venus Black explores the fluidity of right and wrong, the pain of betrayal, and the meaning of love and family.

Heather Lloyd, who has spent many years working as an editor and writing coach, lives with her husband in New York City. My Name Is Venus Black is her first novel.

My Name Is Venus Black
A Novel
By Heather Lloyd
Category: Crime Mysteries
Hardcover : $27.00
Publ.: Feb 27, 2018
368 Pages
ISBN 9780399592188
Publ. by The Dial Press

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Sophie Collins: Who Is Mary Sue?

In the language of fan fiction, a ‘Mary Sue’ is an idealised and implausibly flawless character: a female archetype that can infuriate audiences for its perceived narcissism.

Such is the setting for this brilliant and important debut by Sophie Collins. In a series of verse and prose collages, Who Is Mary Sue? exposes the presumptive politics behind writing and readership: the idea that men invent while women reflect; that a man writes of the world outside while a woman will turn to the interior.

Part poetry and part reportage, at once playful and sincere, these fictive-factive miniatures deploy original writing and extant quotation in a mode of pure invention. In so doing, they lift up and lay down a revealing sequence of masks and mirrors that disturb the reflection of authority.A work of captivation and correction, this is a book that will resonate with anyone concerned with identity, shame, gender, trauma, composition and culture: everyone, in other words, who wishes to live openly and think fearlessly in the modern world.

Who Is Mary Sue? is a work for our times and a question for our age: it is a handbook for all those willing to reimagine prescriptive notions of identity and selfhood.

Sophie Collins is cofounder of tender, an online quarterly promoting work by female-identified writers and artists. She is carrying out research on poetry and translation at Queen’s University Belfast. Collins grew up in Bergen, North Holland, and now lives in Edinburgh. She is co-editor of tender, an online arts quarterly, and editor of Currently & Emotion (Test Centre, 2016), an anthology of contemporary poetry translations. small white monkeys, a text on self-expression, self-help and shame, was published by Book Works in 2017 as part of a commissioned residency at Glasgow Women’s Library.

Sophie Collins
Who Is Mary Sue?
8 February 2018
Published by Faber & Faber
Paperback
£10.99
112 pages
ISBN: 9780571346615
Poetry and prose

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems

Just in time for his 99th birthday, New Directions is proud to present a swift, terrific chronological selection of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s greatest poems.

Through this tight lens, it is now possible to see Ferlinghetti—a brilliant and prolific poet—in a richer, broader, and more complex way. From his very first landmark books—Pictures of the Gone World (City Lights, 1955) and A Coney Island of the Mind (New Directions, 1958)—to new work, Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems displays every stage of this multifaceted writer’s long and celebrated career. It’s exciting to revisit in one slender volume so much of the splendid, playful, and trenchant work of one of America’s greatest and most popular poets.

“A brave man and a brave poet.”––Bob Dylan

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights Books, author of A Coney Island of the Mind and Pictures of the Gone World, among numerous other books, has been drawing from life since his student days in Paris where he frequented the Academie Julien and where he did his first oil painting.

“Lawrence gets you laughing and then hits you with the truth.”––Francis Ford Coppola

Title: Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems
Author: Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Edited by Nancy J. Peters
Publisher New Directions Publishing Corporation
Format Hardcover, $16.95
144 pp.
ISBN-10 081122712X
ISBN-13 9780811227124
Publication Date 21 November 2017

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Heimo Schwilk: Rilke und die Frauen. Biografie eines Liebenden

Rainer Maria Rilke feierte die Liebe, verschrieb sich ihr mit ganzer Seele. Die Frauen standen für ihn im Mittelpunkt.

Angefangen bei seiner innig geliebten Mutter Sophia und der gestrengen »Übermutter« Lou Andreas-Salomé über die Bildhauerin Clara Westhoff bis zu der großzügigen Mäzenin Fürstin von Thurn und Taxis. In seiner neuen, meisterlich geschriebenen Biografie erzählt Heimo Schwilk von diesen Frauen und ihren Schicksalen.

Ein Buch über die Liebe – und wie sie sich in großer Dichtung vollendet.

Heimo Schwilk, geboren 1952 in Stuttgart, Dr. phil., ist Autor zahlreicher Bücher über Politik und Literatur. Seine großen Biografien über Ernst Jünger und Hermann Hesse wurden im In- und Ausland hoch gelobt. Er war lange Jahre Leitender Redakteur der Welt am Sonntag und lebt in Berlin. 1991 wurde er mit dem Theodor-Wolff-Preis für herausragenden Journalismus ausgezeichnet.

Heimo Schwilk
Rilke und die Frauen
Biografie eines Liebenden
‘Piper’ Taschenbuch
Piper Verlag GmbH
Mit 22 Abbildungen
EAN: 9783492308878
ISBN: 3492308872
2016
336 Seiten
kartoniert
€ 11,00

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Robert Lowell: New Selected Poems

Gathered on the occasion of Robert Lowell’s one hundredth birthday, New Selected Poems offers a fresh and illuminating representation of one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry.

The renowned and controversial author of many books of poems, plays, and translations, Lowell was one of the United States’ most honoured poets, winning the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1947 and 1974, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

His ongoing interrogation of his family legacy, his personal struggle with manic depression, and his mastery of the tradition of poetry in English formed the groundbreaking autobiographical foundation of Life Studies (1959) and the books that followed it, including For the Union Dead (1964), Near the Ocean (1967), History (1973), and Day by Day (1977).

Katie Peterson’s incisive selection of Lowell’s poems draws attention to ‘the perishability of life, its twinned quality of fragility and repetition, as framed by the structured evanescence of daily consciousness.’ Lowell’s own intense dramas and struggles are the substrate he drew on in his restless search to make sense of, and fix, shape-shifting experience – not his, but ours. As Peterson says, Lowell was ‘constitutionally immune to any stultifying permanence either of form or of spirit.’  Her brilliant new reading of Lowell shows us his work constantly breaking, renewing, transforming, as he strives restlessly, over and over, to find an elusive unity.

Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was born in Boston. He was recognised as an accomplished poet in his own lifetime, and along with Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman and Sylvia Plath he created the fashion and generated the force of American poetry over the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Life Studies, published in 1959, marked a watershed. It initiated an autobiographical project which would dominate his oeuvre thereafter, and is now regarded as one of the most influential books of the century. He received a Pulitzer Prize for Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) and another for The Dolphin (1973).

New Selected Poems
by Robert Lowell (Author),‎
Katie Peterson (Editor)
ISBN 9780571339488
Format Paperback
Published 03/08/2017
Length 272 pages
£14.99
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374251339
ISBN-13: 978-0374251338

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sam sax: madness (poetry)

An “astounding” (Terrance Hayes) debut collection of poems – Winner of the 2016 National Poetry Series Competition

In this ­­­powerful debut collection, sam sax explores and explodes the linkages between desire, addiction, and the history of mental health. These brave, formally dexterous poems examine antiquated diagnoses and procedures from hysteria to lobotomy; offer meditations on risky sex; and take up the poet’s personal and family histories as mental health patients and practitioners.

Ultimately, Madness attempts to build a queer lineage out of inherited language and cultural artifacts; these poems trouble the static categories of sanity, heterosexuality, masculinity, normality, and health. sax’s innovative collection embodies the strange and disjunctive workings of the mind as it grapples to make sense of the world around it.

About the Author: sam sax is a queer Jewish writer and educator. He’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lambda Literary, The MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Michener Center for Writers. He’s the winner of the 2016 Iowa Review Award and his poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, Poetry, and other journals.

Madness
By Sam Sax
Part of National Poetry Series
Category: Poetry
Published by Penguin Books
Paperback
Sep. 2017
96 Pages
$18.00
ISBN 9780143131700

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The Unaccompanied. Poems by Simon Armitage

A powerful new collection of poetry from the National Book Critics Circle Award nominee and recipient of the Forward Poetry Prize.

In The Unaccompanied, Armitage gives voice to the people of Britain with a haunting grace.

We meet characters whose sense of isolation is both emotional and political, both real and metaphorical, from a son made to groom the garden hedge as punishment, to a nurse standing alone at a bus stop as the centuries pass by, to a latter-day Odysseus looking for enlightenment and hope in the shadowy underworld of a cut-price supermarket.

We see the changing shape of England itself, viewed from a satellite “like a shipwreck’s carcass raised on a sea-crane’s hook, / nothing but keel, beams, spars, down to its bare bones.”

In this exquisite collection, Armitage X-rays the weary but ironic soul of his nation, with its “Songs about mills and mines and a great war, / lines about mermaids and solid gold hills, / songs from broken hymnbooks and cheesy films”–in poems that blend the lyrical and the vernacular, with his trademark eye for detail and biting wit.

Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire and is Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield. A recipient of numerous prizes and awards, he has published eleven collections of poetry, including Seeing Stars, Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989 – 2014, and his acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The Shout: Selected Poems, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and his translation of the medieval poem Pearl received the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He writes extensively for radio and television, has published three best-selling non-fiction titles, and his theatre works include The Last Days of Troy, performed at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. He has taught at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, and in 2015 was appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.

Simon Armitage
The Unaccompanied
Poems
Published by Knopf
Hardcover
$27.00
Aug. 2017
96 Pages
ISBN 9781524732424

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Kathryn Harkup: Making the Monster. The Science Behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

The year 1818 saw the publication of one of the most influential science-fiction stories of all time.

Frankenstein: Or, Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley had a huge impact on gothic horror and science-fiction genres, and her creation has become part of our everyday culture, from cartoons to Hallowe’en costumes. Even the name ‘Frankenstein’ has become a by-word for evil scientists and dangerous experiments. How did a teenager with no formal education come up with the idea for an extraordinary novel such as Frankenstein?

Clues are dotted throughout Georgian science and popular culture. The years before the book’s publication saw huge advances in our understanding of the natural sciences, in areas such as electricity and physiology, for example. Sensational science demonstrations caught the imagination of the general public, while the newspapers were full of lurid tales of murderers and resurrectionists.

Making the Monster explores the scientific background behind Mary Shelley’s book. Is there any science fact behind the science fiction? And how might a real-life Victor Frankenstein have gone about creating his monster? From tales of volcanic eruptions, artificial life and chemical revolutions, to experimental surgery, ‘monsters’ and electrical experiments on human cadavers, Kathryn Harkup examines the science and scientists that influenced Shelley, and inspired her most famous creation.

Kathryn Harkup is a chemist and author. Kathryn completed a PhD then a postdoc at the University of York before realising that talking, writing and demonstrating science appealed far more than spending hours slaving over a hot fume-hood. Kathryn went on to run outreach in engineering, computing, physics and maths at the University of Surrey, which involved writing talks on science and engineering topics that would appeal to bored teenagers, and she is now a science communicator delivering talks and workshops on the quirky side of science.

Making the Monster
The Science Behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
By: Kathryn Harkup
Published: 08-02-2018
Format: Hardback
Edition: 1st
Extent: 304 pp
ISBN: 9781472933737
Imprint: Bloomsbury Sigma
Illustrations: 11 black and white illustrations
Dimensions: 216 x 135 mm
£16.99

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