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4 3 2 1
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Paul Auster
- Length: 36 hrs and 54 mins
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Publisher's summary
"...listening to 4 3 2 1 in audio is worth the commitment, thanks to the author’s easy-on-the-ears baritone" — Newsday
This program is narrated by—and includes a bonus interview with—the author.
Paul Auster’s greatest, most heartbreaking and satisfying novel—a sweeping and surprising story of birthright and possibility, of love and of life itself: a masterpiece.
Nearly two weeks early, on March 3, 1947, in the maternity ward of Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the one and only child of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, is born. From that single beginning, Ferguson’s life will take four simultaneous and independent fictional paths. Four identical Fergusons made of the same DNA, four boys who are the same boy, go on to lead four parallel and entirely different lives. Family fortunes diverge. Athletic skills and sex lives and friendships and intellectual passions contrast. Each Ferguson falls under the spell of the magnificent Amy Schneiderman, yet each Amy and each Ferguson have a relationship like no other. Meanwhile, listeners will take in each Ferguson’s pleasures and ache from each Ferguson’s pains, as the mortal plot of each Ferguson’s life rushes on.
As inventive and dexterously constructed as anything Paul Auster has ever written, yet with a passion for realism and a great tenderness and fierce attachment to history and to life itself that listeners have never heard from Auster before. 4 3 2 1 is a marvelous and unforgettably affecting tour de force.
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Editorial reviews
Editors Select, February 2017 - Archibald Isaac Ferguson is the central character of 4 3 2 1. He's known as Archie by some and as Ferguson by others, and you get to know him from the time he is born through the multiple life outcomes explored by author Paul Auster. Through each nuanced version of his life, I became equally attached to every Archie and every Ferguson revealed to me. Living in and having grown up in Essex County, NJ, I know the towns and landmarks that Auster has set this novel in (my parents also brought me to the now-departed Grunnings Ice Cream parlor). So as I drive through these neighborhoods, I can imagine Archie walking down the street or playing baseball in a local school field. Listening to Paul Auster narrate is like having him in the seat next to me, with the open book on his lap as he calmly reads aloud. This is a book to be savored and allowed to unfold at its own beautiful pace. Tricia, Audible Editor
Critic reviews
"[Paul] Auster's deep understanding of his characters, soothing baritone, and skillful pacing...deliver an immensely satisfying experience overall for listeners" -AudioFile Magazine
"[Paul] Auster’s compelling, mesmerizing voice so embodies all the Fergusons that “4321” is ...worth an entire week’s worth of listening." -Winston-Salem Journal
"[L]istening to “4 3 2 1” in audio is worth the commitment, thanks to the author’s easy-on-the-ears baritone." -Newsday
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Luisa "Lu" Brant is the newly elected - and first female - state's attorney of Howard County, Maryland, a job in which her widower father famously served. Fiercely intelligent and ambitious, she sees an opportunity to make her name by trying a mentally disturbed drifter accused of beating a woman to death in her home. It's not the kind of case that makes headlines, but peaceful Howard County doesn't see many homicides.
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In a word saccharine and boring
- By Rena on 05-12-16
By: Laura Lippman
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Where the Past Begins
- A Writer's Memoir
- By: Amy Tan
- Narrated by: Amy Tan
- Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Moving from her childhood in Oakland and growing up with her Chinese parents through her success as a novelist, Amy Tan delves into her creative interests in music, the paralysis of beginning a new project, journal writing, and travelling. Where the Past Begins chronicles the making of a writer. With characteristic humor and poignant observation, Tan weaves a nontraditional introspective narrative that is as complex and vibrant as this beloved American novelist's fiction.
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Narration Issues
- By Sara on 12-14-17
By: Amy Tan
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Dreams from My Father
- A Story of Race and Inheritance
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
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Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
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Full Circle
- By: Michael Thomas Ford
- Narrated by: Blake Somerset
- Length: 17 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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History professor Ned Brummel is living happily with his partner of 12 years in small-town Maine when he receives a phone call from his estranged friend - Jack - telling him that another friend - Andy - is very ill and possibly near death. As Ned boards a plane to Chicago on his way to his friend's bedside, he embarks on another journey into memory, examining the major events and small moments that have shaped his world and his relationships with these two very different, very important men.
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To Every Season...
- By Donald on 10-01-13
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Indignation
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Ray Chase
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1951, the second year of the Korean War, a studious, law-abiding, and intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, begins his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at a local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hardworking neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad - mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees on every corner for his beloved boy.
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Tight, beautiful and also strange and sad.
- By Darwin8u on 08-22-16
By: Philip Roth
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Flesh Wounds
- By: Richard Glover
- Narrated by: Richard Glover
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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A mother who invented her past, a father who was often absent, a son who wondered if this could really be his family...Richard Glover's favourite dinner-party game is called 'Who's Got the Weirdest Parents?' It's a game he always thinks he'll win. There was his mother, a deluded snob who made up large swathes of her past and who ran away with Richard's English teacher, a Tolkien devotee, nudist and stuffed toy collector.
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Such a Meaningful Reflection
- By Awarenessing on 11-28-15
By: Richard Glover
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Daring
- My Passages - A Memoir
- By: Gail Sheehy
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 14 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Candid, insightful, and powerful, Daring: My Passages is the story of the unconventional life of a writer who dared - to walk New York City streets with hookers and pimps to expose violent prostitution; to march with civil rights protesters in Northern Ireland as British paratroopers opened fire; to seek out Egypt's president Anwar Sadat when he was targeted for death after making peace with Israel.
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Enjoyed unexpectedly
- By Corinne O'Rourke on 09-06-23
By: Gail Sheehy
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I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This
- A Memoir
- By: Nadja Spiegelman
- Narrated by: Nadja Spiegelman
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers - French-born New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly - exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja's body changed and "began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand", their relationship grew tense.
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Aweful
- By Haley Abreu on 07-05-17
By: Nadja Spiegelman
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Because I Come from a Crazy Family
- The Making of a Psychiatrist
- By: Edward M. Hallowell
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
When Edward M. Hallowell was 11, a voice out of nowhere told him he should become a psychiatrist. A mental health professional of the time would have called this psychosis. But young Edward (Ned) took it in stride, despite not quite knowing what "psychiatrist" meant. With a psychotic father, an alcoholic mother, an abusive stepfather, and two so-called learning disabilities of his own, Ned was accustomed to unpredictable behaviour from those around him and to a mind he felt he couldn't always control.
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Love and connection permeates through this book!
- By Steve Steinmetz on 06-29-18
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The Mathematician's Shiva
- By: Stuart Rojstaczer
- Narrated by: Angela Brazil, Stephen R. Thorne
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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When the greatest female mathematician in history passes away, her son, Alexander "Sasha" Karnokovitch, just wants to mourn his mother in peace. But rumor has it the notoriously eccentric Polish émigré has solved one of the most difficult problems in all of mathematics and has spitefully taken the solution to her grave. A ragtag group of mathematicians from around the world descends upon Rachela's shiva, determined to find the proof or solve it for themselves - even if it means prying up the floorboards for notes.
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Great read
- By Lee Crowe on 07-27-15
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Learning to Die in Miami
- Confessions of a Refugee Boy
- By: Carlos Eire
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Carlos Eire's story of a boyhood uprooted by the Cuban Revolution quickly lures us in, as eleven-year-old Carlos and his older brother Tony touch down in the sun-dappled Miami of 1962 - a place of daunting abundance where his old Cuban self must die to make way for a new, American self waiting to be born. In this enchanting new work, narrated in Eire's inimitable and lyrical voice, young Carlos adjusts to life in his new country.
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Excellent memoir of a forgotten time in history
- By BRB on 03-23-15
By: Carlos Eire
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una historia monumental!! (o quizás cuatro)
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I take it all back! Love the book
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Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn to die. Divorced, estranged from his only daughter, the retired life insurance salesman seeks only solitude and anonymity. Then Nathan finds his long-lost nephew, Tom Wood, working in a local bookstore, a far cry from the brilliant academic career he'd begun when Nathan saw him last. Tom's boss is the charismatic Harry Brightman, whom fate has also brought to the "ancient kingdom of Brooklyn, New York".
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Brooklyn IS Still the World
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Facing his 63rd winter, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster sits down to write a history of his body and its sensations - both pleasurable and painful. Thirty years after the publication of The Invention of Solitude, in which he wrote so movingly about fatherhood, Auster gives us a second unconventional memoir in which he writes about his mother's life and death. Winter Journal is a highly personal meditation on the body, time, and memory, by one of our most intellectually elegant writers.
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Memorable
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Mr. Bones, the canine hero of this astonishing book, is the sidekick and confidant of Willy G. Christmas, a brilliant and troubled homeless man from Brooklyn. As Willy's body slowly expires, he sets off with Mr. Bones for Baltimore in search of his high-school English teacher and a new home for his companion. Mr. Bones is our witness during their journey, and out of his thoughts, Paul Auster has spun one of the richest, most compelling tales in American fiction.
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Should I Have Said Gehrig?
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For Jim Nashe, it all started when he came into a small inheritance and left Boston in pursuit of a "life of freedom." Careening back and forth across the United States, waiting for the money to run out, Nashe met Jack Pozzi, a young man with a temper and a plan. With Nashe's last funds, they entered a poker game against two rich eccentrics, "risking everything on the single blind turn of a card."
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It keeps you reading... but whats the point?
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Sunset Park
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An enigmatic young man employed as a trash-out worker in southern Florida obsessively photographing thousands of abandoned objects left behind by the evicted families. A group of young people squatting in an apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The Hospital for Broken Things, which specializes in repairing the artifacts of a vanished world. William Wyler's 1946 classic The Best Years of Our Lives. These are just some of the elements Auster magically weaves together in this immensely moving novel about contemporary America and its ghosts.
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Lovely book
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La trilogía de Nueva York
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En La ciudad de cristal, Daniel Quinn, escritor de literatura policíaca, recibe una llamada telefónica de un desconocido que lo toma por un detective y le encarga un caso. En Fantasmas, un detective privado y el hombre al que debe vigilar juegan al escondite en un claustrofóbico universo urbano. En La habitación cerrada el protagonista debe confrontar los recuerdos de un amigo de la infancia cuando recibe la noticia de su desaparición.
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Para leerse en libro de papel
- By Nora Guzman on 06-27-23
By: Paul Auster, and others
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In the Country of Last Things
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From a life of ease and comfort, Anna Blume embarks on a search for her missing brother. Soon she finds herself trapped in a city obsessed with last things—with the means and manner of death. In this culture of doom, the masses are homeless, theft has ceased to be a crime, production has ceased, and the only growth industries are dying and disassembly.
By: Paul Auster
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Report from the Interior
- By: Paul Auster
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Paul Auster's most intimate autobiographical work to date. In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts…Having recalled his life through the story of his physical self in Winter Journal, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster now remembers the experience of his development from within through the encounters of his interior self with the outer world in Report from the Interior.
By: Paul Auster
What listeners say about 4 3 2 1
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 10-21-19
Narrated by the author
English is not my native language so getting through the book on my own would have been a struggle. The story is so well written (i.e. told) that listening to the author telling it seemed just as it was meant to be. Thank you Mr. Paul Auster.
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- Anonymous
- 08-07-18
Gift that keeps giving
An incredible book. An incredible performance by author Paul Auster, who has such a great voice. 37 hours -- this one feels like the gift that keeps on giving.
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- Sharlotte
- 06-20-18
Starts Out Great...
then ambled further than even a patient me could sometimes tolerate. The writing was very good, but some serious tightening of the story and extensive editing were needed. I did enjoy quite a few parts, nevertheless, so it was still worth a listen.
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- SweeneyTodd
- 08-18-24
Brilliant historical fiction at its luminous best
It took a loooong time to finish, however was well worth it. Auster weaves a brilliant 4-part coming-of-age narrative about a NY-area Boomer, with poignancy and power. A must for all lovers of NYC and of Auster.
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- MOL
- 03-10-18
Could not put this down!
I fell in love with the characters, and their different iterations. They all sprang to life inside my car while I was driving or when I was walking on the streets. I enjoyed the historical backdrop. I was still very young during the tumultuous late 50’s and 60’s. But I’m aware of how there was so much going on then. All in all a satisfying read and the fact that it was narrated by the author made me feel like he was reading it to me. This alone felt like a treat.
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- Natalie Topie
- 11-01-19
A masterful work
Paul Auster is the best author of or times. This is a well-crafted, mind exercising story, which will entertain and move. Paul’s relaxing, skilled voice adds an even greater level of quality to the audiobook. I can’t recommend listening to this book highly enough.
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- sonia pilcer
- 07-02-17
great epic for the baby boomers
from the origin of his love for baseball to the evolution of what became the defining moments of the 60's and 70's, traveling with Archie (s) was so involving that coming to the end feels sad. I will be sharing this with my friends so I can piggyback on what I expect to be similar excitement.
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- SavtaBeth
- 04-27-17
This was best listening experience of my life.
This was best listening experience of my life. I know that I will come back someday to relive the experience. Thank you Mr Auster.
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- SusieH
- 07-01-18
Fantastic idea but Mr. Auster needs a more aggressive editor
I love the idea for this book and I couldn’t wait to read it. I eventually finished it but it was a colossal challenge. Fir starters, there is WAY too much detail. This often reads more like the diary of someone afflicted with OCD than a novel. I understand the author wrote the first draft out in longhand. Maybe it’s too heartbreaking to delete once you’ve put all that effort in. Who knows but good grief, enough with the minutiae! At one point he goes through an elaborate explanation of his finances and why he may not have enough money for school. Egads! I almost fell asleep! There are far too many lists-favourite actors, least favourite vegetables etc...
Aside from the minutiae, there is the possibly related problem of TMI, especially with respect to body fluids. I’m reading to escape the stress and drudgery of daily life. The last thing I want to hear about is an analysis of the pus from someone ‘s pimples. The semen descriptions literally made me nauseous.
Another problem I had was how falsely convenient the plot often became. I was absolutely prepared to suspend my disbelief to allow for the parallel universes or whatever but many of the plot developments struck me as a bit lazy: Archie is broke and suddenly money falls into his lap from highly unlikely sources. Or Archie is having trouble being admitted to school or finding a job but then, by some miraculous twist of fate, everything works out. Meh.
Finally, I figured out about halfway through the book that the four Archies (well 3 of them anyway) are fatty-haters. I don’t know if Mr. Auster has a prejudice or if that was just something with which he imbued his protagonists but it’s mean spirited and it comes through loud and clear. Mr. Auster writes admirably of the sixties, reminding us that the absence of racism was not always applauded but his fatty-hate—and I am by no means equating racism with obesity prejudice—is still troubling.
Spoiler Alert: the portion below contains spoilers. I wish, however, that I’d had this information before I purchased the book. I doubt I’d have selected it. But if you are intent on reading the book, you should probably stop reading now.
I almost abandoned the effort but having made it about two thirds of the way through by the time I was sure about the fatty-hate, I felt as though I were giving up. So I did finish it. The very, very end of the book (what I’m guessing in print would be the last couple of pages) were perhaps the best in the whole book. The author’s voice becomes clear and he explains the story. One could argue that this kind of internal self reflection is nothing more than navel-gazing but I loved it. It almost made listening to the preceding 37 hours worth it.
I chose this book because I thought the idea was interesting and the structure unique. I did enjoy those aspects very much. But I thought I was about to hear the story of a person’s life (well 4 people’s lives.) (Here comes the spoiler-final warning) But none of the Archies makes it past his mid twenties. I don’t want to spoil it too much so suffice it to say these are the stories of boys. If you are interested in listening to almost 40 hours of extremely detailed descriptions of four iterations of a boy’s life from early childhood to early twenties, then this is the book for you. Personally, I’m more interested in hearing the stories of people who have lived long enough to have some adventures and learn a thing or two.
As for the narration, I love authors who do their own readings and I actually thought Mr Auster had a very nice voice. True, it is not as slick and smooth, not as capable of flawless enunciation as many “professionals” but I thought his voice was very pleasing and his performance authentic.
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- William
- 05-08-17
drivel
Narration is monotone. Story is hard to follow. Main character starts young and has an arrogant and unrealistic knowledge if the world around him.
couldn't finish.
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