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38367a7
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Rabbi Heskel Shpilman is a deformed mountain, a giant ruined desert, a cartoon house with the windows shut and the sink left running. A little kid lumped him together, a mob of kids, blind orphans who never laid eyes on a man. They clumped the dough of his arms and legs to the dough of his body, then jammed his head down on top. A millionaire could cover a Rolls-Royce with the fine black silk-and-velvet expanse of the rebbe's frock coat and..
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Michael Chabon |
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5760c1c
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saddlebags and called for water to be heated. He knelt and removed his outer tunic and rolled the white sleeves of the inner one. He rubbed astringent oil into his hands and along his forearms to the elbow, to the amusement of the nephew, who drew a wrongheaded moral from the notion of a physician who medicated himself and not his patient. The stranger leaned in to sniff at the Italian's breath, pressed an ear against his chest and took the..
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Michael Chabon |
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6409e66
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She balanced on a point between rage and its relief. Amid the layers of conscious thought and the involuntary actions of her body, Gwen found herself in possession, coolly palmed in her thoughts like a dollar coin, of the idea that she was about to bring another abandoned son into the world, the son of an abandoned son. The heir to a history of disappointment and betrayal, violence and loss. Centuries of loss, empires of disappointment. All..
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Michael Chabon |
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ebf5f60
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When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness--and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not tr..
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Michael Chabon |
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b0eed3e
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A patchwork of expedients, conflicting principles, innovations nobody understood, holdovers that ought to have been taken off the books years ago. Yet in the midst of modern confusion, fundamental
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Michael Chabon |
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e978f39
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In his combination of earnestness, social conscience, and willingness to scrap, he was a perfect hero for 1943, as America went about the rumbling, laborious business of backing itself into a horrible war.
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Michael Chabon |
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b1d7f61
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She is getting old, and he is getting old, right on schedule, and yet as time ruins them, they are not, strangely enough, married to each other.
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Michael Chabon |
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7dc4eaf
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Because Trickster is looking to stir things up, to scramble the conventions, to undo history and received notions of what is art and what is not, to sing for his supper, to find and lose himself in the act of entertaining. Trickster haunts the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore. And that is where, if it wants to renew itself in the way that the novel has done so often in its long history, t..
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Michael Chabon |
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6ea6a71
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bright men in narrow neckties and short haircuts whose terrible optimism made the sixties such an admirable and disappointing time.
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Michael Chabon |
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2c49b4b
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Chabon's success can be traced back to three requirements: talent, luck, and discipline. "Discipline," he says, "is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two."
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Michael Chabon |
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fdf9c0a
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I remember my mother telling me, when she was in the midst of settling my grandfather's estate, that fifty percent of a person's medical expenses are incurred in the last six months of life. My grandfather's history of himself was distributed even more disproportionately: Ninety percent of everything he ever told me about his life, I heard during its final ten days.
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Michael Chabon |
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f3a6a38
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My grandfather was troubled and fascinated by this alteration from the girl of ten days before. Had the flirtatious gamine in the Ingrid Bergman sunglasses been a pose adopted for the evening, while this shapely vessel leaking sadness approximated something closer to the truth of herself? Or was it the other way around? Maybe neither version was the "truth." Maybe "self" was a free variable with no bounded value. Maybe very time you met her..
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Michael Chabon |
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43ad039
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When at last his moment came, he rose and stood, the only mourner at his end of the room, a solitary tower imprisoning an anonymous sorrow. First he wished for a Redeemer whose arrival he did not expect and a redemption he knew to be impossible. Then he told God all the nice things God seemed to need to hear about Himself. Finally, he wished for peace as it was conventionally understood, which he supposed was unobjectionable if no more like..
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Michael Chabon |
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d349846
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His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. Pearl divers in training, staying under a few seconds longer every time.
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Michael Chabon |
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a972eb2
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I don't like to lose control of my emotions.
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Michael Chabon |
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2f38613
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saddlebags and called for water to be heated. He knelt and removed his outer tunic and rolled the white sleeves of the inner one. He rubbed astringent oil into his hands and along his forearms to the elbow, to the amusement of the nephew, who drew a wrongheaded moral from the notion of a physician who medicated himself and not his patient. The stranger
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Michael Chabon |
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e4aab15
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bells. "I accept your kind invitation," Zelikman said. "My services as a physician ought just to offset my fare." The elephant gave a low moan, startling them, and a moment later they heard a faint trill, carried on the wind from off the river, and then another. "Trumpets," the nephew said."
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Michael Chabon |
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e8a48e0
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wild discipline by a dozen red-shirted men. The remaining half of the black-armored Arsiyah dismounted to confront the barred gate. They could not know, as Zelikman saw plainly from the top of the rise, that the Rus had abandoned, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they
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Michael Chabon |
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0d9de98
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Wait, no, fuck cheese. Cheese is all about spores and, and, molds and all that shit. Maybe cheese is trying to colonize our brains, too. Cheese and music duking it out for control of the human nervous system.
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Michael Chabon |
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b655da3
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In the end, neither fretting nor bravado could distract him any longer from the thought that he was fatherless. He and his father had in their jocular, gingerly fashion loved each other, but now that his father was dead, Joe felt only regret. It was not just the usual regret over things left unsaid, thanks unexpressed and apologies withheld. Joe did not yet regret the lost future opportunities for expatiation on favorite shared subjects, su..
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Michael Chabon |
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ae7ae1b
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Such regrets would come only belatedly, a few days after, when he made the realization that death really did mean that you were never going to see the dead person ever again. What he regretted most of all just now was simply that he had not been there when it happened; that he had left to his mother, grandfather, and brother the awful business of watching his father die.
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Michael Chabon |
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c328856
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One of the fundamental axioms of masculine self-regard is that the tools and appurtenances of a man's life must be containable within the pockets of his jacket and pants. Wallet, keys, gum, show or ball game tickets, Kleenex, condoms, cell phone, maybe a lighter and a pack of cigarettes: Just cram it all in there, motherfucker.
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Michael Chabon |
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de676b8
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I searched my feelings, an activity never far removed from looking for a dead rat in a spidery crawl space under the house.
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Michael Chabon |
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10058fa
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Only Aviva's long habit of taking the temperature of her own racism, of her biases and stereotypes about young black males (or about the iron-hard perdurance of their grandmothers) enabled Aviva to set aside, for the time being, her gut reaction--the boy was trouble--and admire Titus's stillness.
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Michael Chabon |
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dec3fba
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She was a vessel built to hold the pain of her history, but it had cracked her, and radiant darkness leaked out through the crack. When
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Michael Chabon |
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1498d4b
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Maybe I'm tired," he said. "Maybe I'm tired of picking up life in bits and fistfuls and little drawstring bags. When you get to be as old as I am, there's an appeal in the idea of seeing some business through from start to finish."
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Michael Chabon |
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4e5e119
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To reach escape velocity, my grandmother, like any spacefarer, would be obliged to leave almost everything behind her. A moment after he
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Michael Chabon |
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ba3b34c
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Like the Party he had joined too late, too young, Chan was a lost claim check, a series of time lapse photos of a promise as it broke.
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Michael Chabon |
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42eba72
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He felt, and not for the first time today, that he had not made a good decision in his personal or professional life since 1989.
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time
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Michael Chabon |
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1307cfb
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A laboring woman, though, while she endured her labor, lay at the center of something truly radiant in four dimensions; every birth everywhere, all the vectors of human evolution and migration originating and terminating at the parting of her legs.
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Michael Chabon |
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80cdc47
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A model of probity, a steady hand to reassure the grieving, a sober man--a grave man--solid as the pillar of a tomb. A good dose of gangster to the hat to let you know the councilman played his politics old-school, with a shovel in the dark of the moon. Plus that touch of Tombstone, of Gothic western undertaker, like maybe sometimes when the moon was full and Flowers & Sons stood empty and dark but for the vigil lights, Chan Flowers might u..
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Michael Chabon |
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56eb6a2
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And yet in her eyes there was something unreadable, something that did not want to be read, the determined blankness that in predator animals conceals hostile calculation, and in prey forms part of an overwhelming effort to seem to have disappeared.
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Michael Chabon |
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0247fdf
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They were little more than boys, and yet while they differed in race, in temperament, and in their understanding of love, they were united in this: The remnant of their boyhood was a ballast they wished to cut away.
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Michael Chabon |
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a479301
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In photographs she is a boxy woman, girdled with steel, shod in coal-black stompers, her bosom so large it might have housed turbines. She was all but illiterate in Yiddish and English but obliged my grandfather, and later Uncle Ray, to read to her daily from the Yiddish press so that she could keep abreast of the latest calamities to beset Jewry. From
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Michael Chabon |
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87013f0
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As he played it off to Nat, Archy knew--felt, like the baby-shaped ache in his left arm--that neither his ability nor his willingness to care for Rolando English for an hour, a day, a week, had anything whatsoever to do with his willingness or ability to be a father to the forthcoming child now putting the finishing touches on its respiratory and endocrine systems in the dark laboratory of his wife's womb. Wiping
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Michael Chabon |
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cf357bc
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Of always fighting against feeling useless. Of how sad it makes me feel that sisters won't go to a midwife. Also, frankly, I'm sick of overprivileged, neurotic, crazy-ass . . ." She stopped talking. She tucked her crossed arms between her breasts and belly like a pencil behind an ear. "You were going to say white ladies." "Yes!" Gwen said. "With their white-lady latex allergies, and their white-lady OCD birth plans, and that bullshit white-..
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Michael Chabon |
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274ec26
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he stank more than any human joe had ever smelled, as if he had been dipped in some ungodly confection of camembert and rancid gasoline brewed up in a spit-filled cuspidor.
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Michael Chabon |
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a3169a6
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He was glad to have been wakened, contemptuous as ever of the happiness to be found in dreams, displeased with himself for having fallen prey to it once again.
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Michael Chabon |
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c3b219b
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This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit,
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true-to-life
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Michael Chabon |
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162a01c
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But like all beautiful faces Emily's made you believe that its possessor was a better person than she was. It allowed her to pass for stoical when she was petrified, and mysterious and aloof when she was so filled with self-doubt that she bought presents for other people when it was her birthday, framed most of her conversation in terms of apology and regret, and for all her talent could no longer manage to string twenty-five paragraphs fo ..
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Michael Chabon |
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7787922
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He was aware, as he did so, of a poignant air of tragic dedication in all his actions, the dutiful routines of a doomed picket manning his lonely watch, as, beyond the next range of hills, the barbarian horde mounted its conquering ponies.
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conquering-ponies
doomed-picket
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Michael Chabon |
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132c077
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Wie viele einsame Kinder war sein Problem nicht die Einsamkeit an sich, sondern dass er nie allein gelassen wurde, um sie zu geniessen.
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truth
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Michael Chabon |
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ec87e6d
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Sammy dreamed the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation and escape. He dreamed with fierce contrivance, transmuting himself into a major American novelist, or a famous smart person, like Clifton Fadiman, or perhaps into a heroic doctor; or developing, through practice and sheer force of will, the mental powers that would give him a preternatural control over the hearts and minds of men.
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Michael Chabon |
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b865b0e
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Motivation, inspiration were not the problem; on the contrary I was always cheerful and workmanlike at the typewriter and had never suffered from what's called writer's block; I didn't believe in it. The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers wh..
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Michael Chabon |