A former set designer finishes a home makeover, launching an interiors business in the process

Arne Jensen and his wife agreed: A multistory loft was no place for a toddler, so it was time to move out of their place in Lowell. Rather than set their sights on a specific suburb, the pair concentrated on finding the perfect midcentury-style house. They landed on this 1,900-square-foot home in Walpole. “The house had good bones, didn’t need too much work, and was equidistant to our jobs,” Jensen says.An Emmy Award-winning art director who worked for WBZ-TV, Jensen slowly spruced up the home and the property around it. But similarities between designing a set and designing a home are minimal. On a set, he says, “Comfort takes a back seat to presentation.” He did, however, highlight his midcentury modern predilections in designing the TV station’s lobby, where he used Mad Men-era colors and silhouettes.Hints of that palette carry into his home. For one, he painted the front door a spicy red. While the rest of the façade is unchanged, Jensen stepped up, so to speak, the walkway from the driveway to the front door with crisply-cut granite pavers. He infused the front garden with lush personality, planting a Japanese maple, azaleas, and a dwarf white pine.One enters the home beneath a sloped roof sheathed in pine tongue-and-groove planks. Large expanses of glass go from floor to ceiling in front and back, melding the tall, airy space with the mature trees that surround it. “The inside/outside connection attracted us to the home,” Jensen says.The wood floors and ceiling remain untouched, but Jensen stained the interior window frames dark brown so that they recede, allowing the eye to better take in the scenery. The dated, sharp stucco walls were grounded, sanded, and painted. The upper portion of the highest wall, which divides the public space from the bedrooms, is a comforting shade of mochaccino. “The darker color helps knit the wood ceiling to the walls,” Jensen says. “Painting the entire wall bright white made the room feel vast; this brings down the scale.”The fireplace got a makeover, too. The stone chimney, faced in the same material used on the home’s front façade, was midcentury in spirit but…it was ugly. A Portola Paints’ lime wash lends a nuanced patina to the now-smoothly stucco-ed surface. Jensen dismantled the raised hearth and inserted a blackened steel plate flush to the floor. A new Stûv insert, which he says throws off a lot of heat for the room, got a blackened steel surround. Finally, a pine mantel connects the fireplace to the wood ceiling. The result is streamlined but cozy.The coffee table centers on the fireplace, flanked by leather sofas that exude a relaxed, midcentury sensibility. The leftover area at the end of the long, narrow space became a reading nook with Barcelona-style chairs, black and white photography, and those Emmy statuettes. On the flip side of the fireplace, chunky metal chairs scored at an RH outlet sit around a narrow dining table with a walnut finish.To further open the floor plan, Jensen took the down the wall between the dining room and kitchen, replacing it with a breakfast bar. Upper cabinetry was banished in favor of maple base cabinets with deep drawers that the couple loves for their ease. Black granite countertops ground the light wood. The focal point is the backsplash, composed of skinny, stacked olive tiles from Heath Ceramics. “I’m from the Bay Area, where Heath tiles are a staple,” Jensen says.The varied green tones blend beautifully with the view, pulling one’s attention outdoors. Not that the family needs encouragement. The refurbished deck, which runs the length of the house, features an outdoor kitchen with a gas grill and a smoker. There’s also a Solo pellet stove for warmth and a pergola with a louvered top for dining al fresco. Grape vines replanted from the existing arbor spill over new, modern rails. Motivated by the soothing sound of running water, Jensen nestled a pond, complete with lily pads and frogs, off to the side.The bocce court, however, was already there; Jensen appreciates how it separates the house from the lawn. Visitors are more likely to find the homeowner in the vegetable enclosure he built, tending to raised beds of tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage, and more. (No luck getting asparagus to grow yet.)Since undertaking this multiyear project, much of it accomplished with his own hands, Jensen has transitioned out of television, launching an interior design and graphics firm. “I discovered it’s a lot of hard work,” he says, “but it’s fun.”Interior and landscape design: Arne Jensen Design, arnejensendesign.comPhotographsThe homeowners enhanced the outdoor spaces with a pergola on the refurbished deck, modern rails, new stairs, and an enclosure for a vegetable garden at one end of the bocce court.Lara KimmererMaple cabinetry from Norfolk Kitchen & Bath and tile from Heath Ceramics impart a midcentury vibe.Lara KimmererThe dining area.Lara KimmererPotted water lilies grow back each year in the pond Jensen created.Lara KimmererMarni Elyse Katz is a contributing editor to the Globe Magazine. Follow her on Instagram @StyleCarrot. Send comments to [email protected].

Summer film screenings at Fourth Taki Plaza Lecture attract 90 participants

The fourth Taki Plaza Lecture, “MOVIES IN TAKI: Adventure for Summer,” was held on July 12 and 19, 2024 at Hisao & Hiroko Taki Plaza (Taki Plaza), Tokyo Tech’s flagship exchange hub on Ookayama Campus. The event was co-organized by the Student Support Center’s Student Success Support Section, the Student Support Division’s Support Planning Group, and the Tokyo Tech Alumni Association.Participants watching film in Taki Plaza’s Event SpaceThis event was one of several sessions comprising the Student Success Support Project, an initiative supported by Tokyo Tech alumnus and Gurunavi Inc. Chairman and Director Hisao Taki, which aims to encourage students who are actively engaged in various activities at Taki Plaza.Screenings July 12Inception (Warner Bros.)
July 19Stand By Me (Columbia Pictures)
This academic year, Student Success Support Project student organizers selected two films to be screened under the theme of “Adventure for Summer.” Inception (2010), directed by internationally acclaimed director Christopher Nolan, and Stand By Me (1986), considered by many to be a masterpiece of adolescent-themed cinema, attracted an audience of roughly 90 participants. Both movies were screened in English with Japanese subtitles. Popcorn and cold drinks were handed out to viewers on a first-come, first-served basis.Before each screening, student moderators Teru Hashimoto and Namkyong Kim offered humor-laced introductions to create a comfortable atmosphere at the venue. Institute for Liberal Arts (ILA) Associate Professor Yuto Koizumi also provided insightful commentary on how to get the most out of the films, sharing his interpretation of movie highlights, social backgrounds, and other explanations that added to the enjoyment and revealed new aspects of the works. Quizzes on the films were organized after the screenings to encourage further interaction among the participants.Film commentary by ILA Associate Professor KoizumiBefore each screening, Koizumi introduced the film and its director. After the viewings, he explained the themes of the films and details of the storylines further. Participants listened intently to the explanations, which included background knowledge of the film, examples of episodes in the production process, and comparisons with other films.ILA Assoc. Prof. Koizumi providing commentary on Stand By MeComments from Student Success Support Project student organizersTeru Hashimoto2nd-year master’s student, Transdisciplinary Science and EngineeringI am pleased to have been involved in the planning of this event. I was initially a bit worried about whether the event would attract participants, but on the actual day, many people joined us even though the theme did not have much to do with science. Thanks to Associate Professor Koizumi’s commentary, we also learned about movies from the perspective of an academic and film critic, and I think this created important links to my studies.I would like to thank everyone who participated in this event, as well as Associate Professor Koizumi, Professor Sachiko Ito from the Student Support Center, and all the faculty and staff who provided support. We will continue to organize various events in the future, and we look forward to working with a wide variety of people.Ryota Uehara2nd-year master’s student, Materials Science and EngineeringIt was such a pleasure to watch movies with many Tokyo Tech students, faculty, and staff at Taki Plaza in line with the theme of “Adventure for Summer.” Although I have had many opportunities to interact with people from abroad in my daily research activities, I had never experienced watching a movie together, so I think this was a meaningful experience. This will help me to interact more smoothly with people from different countries in the future.At this MOVIES IN TAKI event, we wanted to give Tokyo Tech students a taste of what it feels like to be on an adventure before their summer vacation. We screened two films. One of these was Inception, an adventure through memory, and the other was Stand By Me, an outdoor adventure involving elementary school students.We thought that the first of these films would attract a big audience as it is a science fiction film, but perhaps the second would not. However, on the day of the screening of Stand By Me, many more people than we had expected attended, including plenty of students who had not made advance reservations. We are certain that the viewers truly enjoyed this event as they were immersed in the films from start to finish.The event was made even more enjoyable thanks to Associate Professor Koizumi’s film commentary. Many students who viewed the films commented that they would like to hear more of his contributions.We will continue to do our best to plan interesting events for many Tokyo Tech students in the future.Namkyong Kim4th year, Materials Science and EngineeringThis event was planned under the theme of “Adventure for Summer.” Both Inception and Stand by Me are similar to adventures that have appeared in my dreams, and after watching the films, I strongly wanted to try something new myself. This event allowed me to imagine what it takes to turn something like a dream into a movie, and it really motivated me academically from the perspective of materials science and engineering. The film commentary also taught me about a variety of things, including stories related to the directors and actors, and other films related to the ones screened.The student staff, including myself, not only selected the films, but also created quizzes about the films. We also devised a way for participants to share their answers at the end. I feel that we were able to greatly enhance our appreciation of films by listening to the commentary and learning about other people’s opinions through the quiz. We practiced the ability to perceive things from multiple perspectives, and that can be applied in our future research and presentations.(from left) Assoc. Prof. Koizumi, Uehara, Hashimoto, Kim, Student Support Center’s Prof. Ito Source & references /Public Release. View in full here.

Tourism, a catalyst for economic diversification

As part of its strategic efforts to drive economic diversification, Botswana is positioning itself as a premier destination for hosting Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Exhibitions (MICE).This vision was articulated by Vice President Slumber Tsogwane during his address at the 7th Africa Tourism Leadership Forum (ATLF) 2024 in Gaborone.
The forum, held under the theme “Charting a New Path Forward for Intra-Africa Travel, Tourism, and Investment,” attracted participation from 43 countries, bringing together over 500 delegates and speakers from across the African continent.
Tsogwane emphasized that tourism is a major contributor to Botswana’s economy, with significant potential for growth.
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In 2019, tourism contributed 13.1% to the gross domestic product (GDP) and accounted for 8.9% of jobs in the country.
International visitor spending injected P16.2 billion into the economy in 2023, a figure projected to rise to P20.2 billion in 2024 and reach P31.3 billion by 2034.
TOURISM DESTINATION: Okavango Delta
Although domestic visitor spending was slightly lower at P8.08 billion in 2023, it is also expected to increase, reaching P11.3 billion by 2034.
“Our goal is to develop and position Botswana as a tourist destination of choice,” said Tsogwane. “The tourism policy emphasizes product development and diversification as key drivers of growth within the tourism industry.
Additionally, there is a push to promote adventure and cultural tourism to attract more visitors locally, regionally, and globally, complementing the nation’s traditional wildlife tourism offerings.”
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He further highlighted that Botswana is renowned for its authentic and exciting wilderness, offering unparalleled nature, heritage, and local lifestyle experiences in a safe and easily accessible environment.
Botswana has consistently hosted high-profile international conferences, including the US-Africa Business Summit in 2023, FACETS 2023, and the International Association of Gaming Regulators conference, to name a few.
“The tourism industry is being diversified to provide economic growth and employment opportunities for local communities, empowering them to participate and benefit meaningfully from the industry,” Tsogwane stated, noting that the forum was unique in emphasizing tourism as a major economic pillar for diversifying African economies.
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Minister of Environment and Tourism, Nnaniki Makwinja, echoed these sentiments, stating that hosting a convention of this magnitude for three consecutive years is a strong indicator of the successful implementation of major policy goals.
She emphasized that the event bolstered the African tourism sector recovery plan, which includes interventions aimed at protecting and rejuvenating the industry, reigniting demand, and strengthening the capabilities necessary to support the sector’s recovery.
“Through this forum, we aimed to celebrate Botswana’s diverse tourism offerings and their significant contribution to the country’s economy. Facilitating investments in tourism can deliver more inclusive and sustainable growth, particularly in new areas within communities across Africa,” Makwinja said. She added that the forum, hosted locally for the past three years, has already yielded many benefits, particularly the growth of the tourism industry, with many local operators establishing linkages to other markets across Africa and beyond.
MINISTER: Makwinja
The 7th African Tourism Leadership Forum and Awards served as a crucial platform for the tourism sector to celebrate, engage, reflect, and commemorate achievements in line with the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.
The master classes conducted as part of the event provided a platform for the upcoming investment phase and for developing networks that will prepare businesses to meet international standards.

IIFL Finance Shares Surge 13% As RBI Lifts Six-Month Ban On Gold Loan Business

IIFL Finance Shares Surge 13% As RBI Lifts Six-Month Ban On Gold Loan Business | Image Source: Wikipedia (Representative)

IIFL Finance Limited shares on Friday (September 20) experiences a sharp increase in its stock price. This surge in stock prices was in response to a major announcement from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The RBI has lifted restrictions on the company’s gold loan business, which had been in place for more than six months. Following this, the shares of the company surged by up to 13 per cent, hitting an intraday high of Rs 560.60 from the previous close of Rs 497.9 on Thursday.At 1:34 pm IST, the shares were trading at Rs 535.75, up 8.01 per cent.
Share performance | The stock of the company today opened at Rs 549.00, and reached a high of Rs 560.60 before falling to a low of Rs 530.00 during the day.

With a market capitalisation of Rs 22,670 crore, the stock traded a total of 8.62 lakh shares, leading to a turnover of Rs 47.45 crore on the BSE by the afternoon.
The stock, with a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 13.32 and a dividend yield of 0.73 per cent, is still far from its 52-week high of Rs 683.19.RBI Lifts Restrictions on Gold Loan BusinessOn Thursday, September 19, IIFL Finance through an exchange filing announced that RBI had removed the restrictions that had been affecting its gold loan business since March 4, 2024.
RBI Lifts Ban On IIFL Finance’s Gold Loan Business | Image: IIFL Finance (Representative)
“We wish to inform you that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), through its communication dated September 19, 2024, has lifted the restrictions imposed on the gold loan business of IIFL Finance Limited (“the Company”). These restrictions were earlier imposed on March 04, 2024, which prohibited the Company from sanctioning, disbursing, or assigning/securitising/selling any of its gold loans,” said the company in the regulatory filing. “The RBI’s decision is effective immediately and allows the Company to resume the sanctioning, disbursal, assignment, securitization, and sale of gold loans in compliance with all relevant laws and regulations.

LETTER: Forensic science professionals play an essential role

As we celebrate the 12th anniversary of National Forensic Science Week (Sept. 15-21), it is a privilege to highlight the critical contributions of the Canton-Stark County Crime Laboratory to our community and the field of forensic science. We honor the dedication and expertise of our team, whose critical work plays a pivotal role in ensuring the safety and integrity of our local legal system.At the Canton-Stark County Crime Laboratory, we are committed to upholding the highest standards in forensic analysis. Our team works diligently to provide quality, objective and timely results in a range of forensic disciplines, including latent prints, firearms, alcohol analysis and drug analysis. Each piece of evidence we examine is treated with the utmost care, with the goal of delivering reliable information that supports our stakeholders and aids in the pursuit of justice.National Forensic Science Week offers a valuable opportunity to recognize the tireless efforts of our staff. Their work is often conducted behind the scenes, but its impact is profound. From solving complex cases to ensuring that evidence is handled with the utmost care, our team’s expertise contributes significantly to the fair administration of justice within Stark County.The week also serves as a reminder of the importance of ongoing support and investment in forensic science. As technology evolves, so too must our capabilities. We are committed to staying at the forefront of forensic advancements. This requires continuous investment in resources, training and technology.I am immensely proud of the work our team does, grateful for the support of our community, and thankful for the city of Canton and the Stark Council of Governments. Let us recognize the essential role of forensic science professionals and reaffirm our commitment to supporting their invaluable work.Dr. Cody Braley, director, Canton-Stark County Crime Laboratory, Canton

Taiwan offers foreign tourists buy-one-get-one-free transport pass

Taipei, Sept. 20 (CNA) Foreign tourists buying a seven-day Taiwan Pass will now get a second free as part of a government bid to boost tourism, the Tourism Administration under the Ministry of Transportation and Communications announced Friday.A pair of Taiwan Passes is priced at NT$5,000 (US$156.4), a staff member at the agency told CNA, noting that such passes can be used separately.The pass can be used in many of Taiwan’s major cities and to travel to several tourist resorts. It expires seven days after it is first used, the staffer said.In a statement, Tourism Administration Director-General Chou Yung-hui (周永暉) said the pass is a three-in-one package covering Taiwan High-Speed Rail, mass rapid transport (MRT) services, and the Taiwan Tourist Shuttle service.Taiwan Pass is exclusive to foreign tourists visiting Taiwan for a short period, the press statement said.According to the Tourism Administration, travelers with the pass can take unlimited High-Speed Rail rides across the island for three days from the first ride.The pass holders are also entitled to a free round trip on the Taiwan Tourist Shuttle service to one of four popular tourist destinations — Qingjing Farm or Sun Moon Lake in Nantou County, Alishan in Chiayi County, or Kenting in Pingtung County.In addition, the pass provides unlimited free rides on one of Taiwan’s four MRT systems: the Taipei/New Taipei MRT, the Taichung MRT, the Kaohsiung MRT and light rail, and the Taoyuan Airport MRT.Those choosing Taoyuan can ride the metro for seven days, while those selecting the other three areas will have 48 hours of access, the agency said.Around 3,000 passes are available in the buy-one-get-one-free sale, which began on Sept. 13 and is set to end on April 30, 2025.
(By Chao Yen-hsiang and Yu Hsiao-han)
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Dailysun | Family of slain scientist to face her ‘killer’

The man accused of killing Dr Dorcas Lekganyane will appear in the Alexandra Magistrates Court on Friday, 20 September.

FAMILY to face their kid’s alleged killer.The family of slain scientist, Dorcas “Didi” Lekganyane will face the man accused of killing her.This will likely happen when Cecile Kekana, Didi’s husband, appears in the Alexandra Magistrates Court on Friday, 20 September. Kekana stands accused of stabbing his wife to death in their Joburg home on 11 July.Family spokesman, Robert Lekganyane revealed how Didi’s death has taken a toll on the family. According to Robert, Dorcas’s mum’s health has been fluctuating, with her going in and out of hospital, while her three-year-old girl is forced to bear the pain of growing up without a mum. ALSO READ | ‘Horny’ lover’s rage at tavern!”It’s been hard. Didi’s mum is a teacher and is expected to retire next year, but she’s been psychosocially impacted negatively since the tragic incident, to an extent that she’s been hospitalised many times and has even thought of taking early retirement to heal and cope.  “While Didi’s kid was exposed to the crime, our worry is how she’ll grow up with that trauma,” said Robert. Didi, originally from Limpopo, Ga-Mothapo Phomolong, was a celebrated South African scientist with a master’s degree in environmental science, specialising in botany and plant biotechnology.  Before her unfortunate death, she was recognised as one of the Mail & Guardian’s 2024 200 Young South Africans.For more news and entertainment in the palm of your hand, follow our WhatsApp Channel via this link 

Fall book preview: 62 new titles to read this season

In fiction, fall 2024 brings a nice mix of works by CanLit stalwarts Jane Urquhart, Heather O’Neill and Caroline Adderson; promising up-and-comers such as Anne Hawk and Andrew Forbes; and a gaggle of newly translated, award-winning novels by francophone Quebec writers Éric Chacour, Kevin Lambert and Fanny Britt. On the international front, look for novels by heavy-hitters Roddy Doyle, Rachel Kushner, Alan Hollinghurst and Sally Rooney.It surely says something about the present moment that absurdity is making a comeback in fiction of all stripes, and that several novels in the list below involve sinister goings-on in communes and health retreats. Environmental anxiety, no surprise, continues to be a preoccupation in both fiction (David Huebert, Louise Erdrich, Richard Powers) and non-fiction.Books we’re reading and loving this week: Globe staffers and readers share their book picksElsewhere in non-fiction, two new books by Timothy Snyder and Carol Off probe the evolving meaning of the word “freedom,” while a collection of Mavis Gallant’s early Montreal newspaper columns gives us glimpses of the literary powerhouse she was to become. The season is also strong for graphic and non-graphic memoirs and biographies, as well as letter collections: a massive one by the inimitable, late neurologist Oliver Sacks, and a recently unearthed (and much slimmer) one by a Scottish pacifist writing to her Canadian soldier brother during the First World War.Happy reading!CANADIAN FICTION

In Winter I Get Up at Night, Jane Urquhart (McClelland & Stewart) Urquhart’s first novel in nearly a decade (since The Night Stages) is narrated by a woman reflecting back on her unusual life. It’s strongly affected by the time she spent in a children’s ward after she was injured in an accident when she was 11, and by a series of powerful male figures she met during her early morning work commutes to her job as a music teacher in rural Saskatchewan.Moon Road, Sarah Leipciger (Viking) The classic road trip gets a sombre twist in this novel by the author of Coming Up for Air, about divorced septuagenarians Kathleen and Yannick, who, two decades after their daughter goes missing, explore pains and joys past on a drive from Ontario to Tofino, B.C., after the discovery there of unidentified bones on a hiking trail.

Oil People, David Huebert (McClelland & Stewart) Huebert transposes the concerns explored in his Alistair MacLeod Prize-winning book of short stories, Chemical Valley – namely, of our troubled, Faustian relationship to the earth’s riches – to a larger canvas in this Gothic-tinged first novel about a Southern Ontario family whose decrepit oil farm is haunted by the acts of their Victorian forebears.All You Can Kill, Pasha Malla (Coach House, October) Plugged as The White Lotus meets Shaun of the Dead, Malla’s absurdist fourth novel takes place in a setting fast supplanting remote cabins and empty asylums in the horror genre: the modern-day wellness retreat.

The Coming Bad Days, Sarah Bernstein (Knopf, October) This is the actual debut of last year’s Giller winner, which was originally published in 2021 in Britain, where she now lives. It shares Study for Obedience’s spare sense of ominousness in a tale about a female academic who starts to withdraw from society after moving to an unnamed city.The Diapause, Andrew Forbes (Invisible, October) Touted by its publisher as White Fang meets Station Eleven, Forbes’s speculative first novel (after two well-received short-story collections) begins as 10-year-old Gabriel, a delicate only child, is heading to a cabin north of Peterborough, Ont., to weather a pandemic. It then moves quickly forward in time to chart the repercussions of the events that took place there on the rest of his life.

The Pages of the Sea, Anne Hawk (Biblioasis, October) This finely observed debut by the London-based writer who grew up in Canada and the Caribbean, tells (often in dialect) the coming-of-age story of a young girl. In the early 1960s, she is left with her sisters on an unnamed Caribbean island under the care of aunts and cousins after her mother (part of the so-called Windrush generation) sails to England in search of work.May Our Joy Endure, Kevin Lambert (Biblioasis) “Febrile,” “provocative” and “incendiary” are among the breathless adjectives used to describe the novels of this young writer from Chicoutimi, Que., whose three books to date won or were nominated for multiple big awards in Quebec, France and English Canada (the latter for the translation of Querelle de Roberval). This latest (a Prix Goncourt finalist) is a social satire involving an architect who faces extreme unanticipated blowback for her plans for a major Montreal public works project.

The Capital of Dreams, Heather O’Neill (HarperCollins) In this fable of a novel (inspired by her father and uncles’ experiences in the Second World War), O’Neill ventures far from the usual Montreal setting of her books. A small unnamed European country, famous for its arts, has just been invaded by a long-time enemy, prompting young Sophia to ferry her writer mother’s manuscript to safety by train, accompanied by – what else? – a talking goose.What I Know About You, Éric Chacour (Coach House, September) Chacour’s first novel, about the forbidden, epic love between two men in 1960s Cairo that sends one of them, a doctor, into exile in Montreal, was a bona fide sensation in Quebec and France (Chacour calls both places home), where it won several high-profile prizes, including France’s Prix des libraires – making it the first Quebec novel to be so honoured since Anne Hébert’s Kamouraska in 1971.

Sugaring Off, Fanny Britt (Book*hug, October) The writer’s 2020 novel – about how the destinies of a wealthy white couple from Quebec and a young African-American woman take radically different courses after a surfing accident in Martha’s Vineyard – won the Governor-General’s Literary Award for French-language Fiction.GRAPHIC MEMOIRS

All Our Ordinary Stories: A Multigenerational Family Odyssey, Teresa Wong (Arsenal Pulp, September) When her mother fell into depression after being hospitalized for a mild stroke in 2014, it sent Wong – who, like many children of immigrants, struggles to speak to her Chinese parents in their native language – on a path to better understand them. This included a past in which they suffered and starved under Mao’s failed socio-economic programs prior to their daring escape to Canada.Beirut, Barrack Zailaa Rima (Invisible) The social and political tumult that has rocked much of the Arab world in the 21st century has, on the positive side, brought with it a flowering of the comic arts. One cartoonist (and filmmaker) working in this context is the Brussels-based Rima, whose portrait of post-Civil War Beirut, at once nostalgic and alienating, takes us from the mazes of the city’s alleys to the din of its public squares.

Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love, Sarah Leavitt (Arsenal Pulp, September) “After her death, I continued living, which surprised me,” writes the Vancouver cartoonist (author of the acclaimed Tangles, about her mother’s early onset Alzheimer’s, soon to be an animated film starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Seth Rogen) at the beginning of this unique and devastatingly affecting collection of drawings and text fragments, which she produced in the two years after the death by assisted suicide of her partner of 22 years.LETTERS

Letters from the Little Blue Room: An Intimate Portrait of World War I, Daisy Thomson Gigg (Barbican, October) First published anonymously, in 1917, by the controversial wartime publisher Charles Daniel – who was variously arrested and imprisoned for his pacifist publications – this recently unearthed (from the rare-books room of the British Library) collection of frank, funny and encouraging letters was written to a soldier fighting in the trenches as part of the Canadian Expeditionary Force by his Scottish-American sister.Letters, Oliver Sacks (Knopf, November) The first entry in this 752-page collection of the motorcycle-riding neurologist’s missives to family, friends and colleagues – sent from Vancouver Island to the then 27-year-old’s parents in 1960 – offers a detailed, pages-long description of his recent travels by plane and train through Canada, whose natural wonders he admires but whose social prohibitions he finds confounding. Of Alberta, “Drinking is not gregarious here. It is hard and solitary”; of Quebec, “a woman cannot vote, cannot divorce her husband, cannot have a banking account of her own.”SHORT STORIES

A Way to Be Happy, Caroline Adderson (Biblioasis) Though her writing is incisive, emotionally astute, slyly funny and award-winning, it still feels like Adderson hasn’t quite gotten her due as one of this country’s best short-story writers. The first story in this Giller-longlisted collection, about a couple who awkwardly try to burgle a Christmas party while posing as guests, sets the tone for the tales to come.Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster, Damian Tarnopolsky (Freehand) Tarnopolsky’s novel Goya’s Dog was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. Writer Mark Anthony Jarman describes the mood of this new collection of stylistically experimental stories, whose settings span from 1980s England to Renaissance France to present-day Canada, as “a pleasing chaos, like Nabokov on acid.”

Journey, Souvankham Thammavongsa and Alexander MacLeod, eds. (McClelland & Stewart) The Journey Prize (now The Writers’ Trust of Canada McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize) got its start from an unlikely source: an endowment from the American writer James A. Michener, who came up with the idea of donating the Canadian royalties from one of his novels to support fledgling Canadian writers. The prize’s continuing relevance is evident in the fine list of authors represented in this anthology, produced for its 35th anniversary, among them: André Alexis, Paige Cooper, Eden Robinson and Madeleine Thien.Dogs and Monsters, Mark Haddon (Doubleday, October) The author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time taps the current vogue for retellings of Greek myths in eight stories that play with time, narrative and moral choices. Transplanted to 16th-century England, for example, the tale of the minotaur becomes a parable about maternal love when the human mother of the gentle part-bull “mooncalf” – condemned as a monster by his monster of a father – does everything in her power to save him from his labyrinth-cum-dungeon.INTERNATIONAL FICTION

Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner (Scribner) The Flamethrowers author is back with a brainy psychological thriller in which a daredevil American female secret agent starts to question her identity after she’s recruited to infiltrate a commune in rural, cave-strewn France. The commune’s elusive leader, Bruno Lacombe, communicates (relatably) only by e-mail, and is convinced the way to make the world great again lies in the Neanderthal past.Elaine, Will Self (Grove, September) Self has been a polarizing figure – there are arguably as many admirers of his satirical, experimental and occasionally grotesque books as detractors – but he is rarely dull. The British writer drew on his late mother’s diaries from the mid-fifties, during a time when the family briefly moved to Ithaca, N.Y., to create this Mrs. Dalloway-adjacent portrait of a woman straining at the intellectual and marital confines of her existence.

Intermezzo, Sally Rooney (Knopf, September) The Normal People phenom moves from love triangles to sibling strife, and a revamped, more clipped style, in this tale of two Irish brothers – one a chess champ losing his edge, the other a progressive lawyer – whose relationship strains after their father’s death of cancer.Playground, Richard Powers (Random House, September) Powers re-engages with the themes – art, memory, humanity’s interconnectedness with the nature, technology and ethics – that have infused his fiction and that helped win him a Pulitzer with The Overstory. This complex, ocean-spanning novel is about two men – one wealthy and white, one poor and Black – who bonded in private school over their love of the game Go, but who later fall out while designing an ambitious computer game named Playground.

Quarterlife, Devika Rege (Liveright) Canadian-American critic and Pulitzer finalist Vauhini Vara declared this sprawlingly ambitious, character-stuffed debut in the mould of Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie – centred around the rise of Indian nationalism in 1914 – “India’s literary novel of the year.”The Women Behind the Door, Roddy Doyle (Viking) Doyle here revisits his character Paula Spencer, first introduced in 1996′s The Woman Who Walked into Doors. A survivor of domestic violence, the recovering alcoholic and now widow must confront the simmering resentment of her middle-aged daughter during the COVID pandemic.

Lesser Ruins, Mark Haber (Coffee House Press, October) Haber’s three novels to date all feature characters who approach self-destruction in pursuit of their respective obsessions. In this mordantly absurd, virtually paragraphless book, a retired professor and recent widower does battle with endless intrusions – including his son’s electronic-dance-music album project – in the hopes of completing his magnum opus: a book on essayist Michel de Montaigne.Our Evenings, Alan Hollinghurst (Knopf, October) The British writer and Booker winner (The Line of Beauty) has made a career of writing nuanced novels about LGBTQ characters against rich historical backdrops. Staying with his strengths in a novel called a “tour de force” in one early review, Hollinghurst here tells the intertwined stories of two men – a gay, biracial actor and the mentor who enabled his career by getting him into boarding school in the 1960s – in the decades leading up to Brexit.

The Mighty Red, Louise Erdrich (HarperCollins, October) The Red of the title would be the Red River; specifically, the northern one that runs between Winnipeg and North Dakota, where this expansive drama – about everyday humans whose foibles are set against a backdrop of environmental ruination (fracking, pesticides) – and so much of Erdrich’s other work takes place.A Case of Matricide, Graeme Macrae Burnet (Biblioasis, November) The multiple Booker-nominated Scottish novelist has made a project of undermining the certainties and assumptions we bring to fiction by blurring truth and artifice. In this third book featuring the melancholic, insecure Inspector Gorski, the latter finds himself drawn to the case of a woman in a small French town who’s convinced that her novelist son is plotting her demise.FICTION IN TRANSLATION

There Are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak (Knopf) One of Turkey’s best-known and most prolific contemporary writers (and long-time exile) unites the disparate stories of three characters via the image of a raindrop and the reality of two rivers – the Thames and the Tigris – with The Epic of Gilgamesh thrown in for good measure.Overstaying, Ariane Koch (NYRB) In this absurdist comic novel – which won Germany’s most prestigious prize for first fiction – a woman returns to her childhood home in a small town, where her parents have been supplanted by a strange, shapeshifting “visitor” whom she initially welcomes, but whose continuing presence and idiosyncrasies eventually start to oppress her.

The Empusium, Olga Tokarczuk (Riverhead, September) The Polish Nobel winner channels Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain in this 1913-set tale of a young Pole who goes to a sanitorium in the Silesian Mountains to recover from tuberculosis only to end up, after finding it full, at a nearby “Guesthouse for Gentlemen.” There, among other sinister goings-on, the all-male residents drink hallucinogenic liqueur while debating the philosophical questions of the day (one of which isn’t men’s innate superiority over women, that being a given).The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami (Knopf Doubleday, November) It feels like some species of Murakami book (a new translation, his recent Manga stories or collections of literary or film criticism) appears every few months; but for the Japanese author’s die-hard fans, the publication of a new novel, the first in six years – billed as “a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for these strange post-pandemic times” – is a very big deal indeed.HISTORY

The Knowing, Tanya Talaga (HarperCollins) The Seven Fallen Feathers author uses a personal lens to examine the still-raw history of colonialism’s impact on Indigenous people: namely, her search to find out how her maternal great-great-grandmother, Annie Carpenter, ended up buried in an unmarked grave on the grounds of a “lunatic asylum” by the side of Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway, thousands of kilometres from her home in Sioux Lookout, Ont.The Siege, Ben Macintyre (McClelland & Stewart) The author of Agent Sonya and Operation Mincemeat, among many others, relates the story of the tense, six-day siege of the Iranian embassy in London in 1980 that resulted in the taking of 26 hostages, and which, as the first such incident to play out in real time on TV, marked, according to Macintyre, “a turning point in the relationship between breaking news and the viewing public.”

Dangerous Memory, Charlie Angus (Anansi, October) The 1980s’ outrageous gelled hairdos and synth dance tracks are fuelling the latest nostalgia cycle, and yet it’s within that decade, the punk-rocker-turned-politician argues, that we can find the root of much of our current socio-economic malaise, from the rise of income inequality and billionaire oligarchs to the climate crisis.Four Points of the Compass, Jerry Brotton (Grove/Atlantic, November) We take for granted that north always sits atop of our maps, yet this hasn’t always been the case; some societies used south and east as their cardinal directions, an orientation that, according to the author, a British historian and broadcaster, continues to affect their languages and beliefs.

Give Me Winter, Give Me Dogs, Kenn Harper (Inhabit, November) The Arctic historian gives an account (supported by wonderful photos and maps) of Knud Rasmussen’s famed Fifth Thule Expedition, in which the Danish-Inuit explorer undertook, between 1921 and 1924, a 20,000-mile journey by dog sled from his native Greenland to Siberia. Along the way, he collected data, artifacts and oral histories from Canadian Inuit that would have a lasting impact on our understanding of the latter’s culture and history.The White Ladder, Daniel Light (Norton, November) George Mallory’s famous utterance – “Because it is there” – turns out to be just one of many reasons that humans have sought the Earth’s highest places, as the author, a London-based mountaineer, shows in this comprehensive history of mountaineering.LITERARY CRITICISM

Salvage, Dionne Brand (Knopf) Brand’s first major work of non-fiction in more than 20 years combines memoir and literary criticism as she revisits the English novels – by Bronte, Austen, Defoe, Thackeray, et al. – that once shaped her thinking, but which, she came to realize, served to normalize slavery and colonialism.The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies, Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton, October) Famous for her luminous trilogy of “living autobiographies,” the British novelist and poet here compiles a series of brief observations on her favourite writers (Marguerite Duras: “a reckless thinker, an egomaniac, a bit preposterous really. I believe she had to be”) and on her life and thoughts (“It has always been very clear to me that men and women who wear shoes without socks are destined to become my friends and lovers”) that collectively serve as a kind of Cubist character self-study.CLIMATE & ENVIRONMENT

Our Green Heart, Diana Beresford-Kroeger (Random House) Laying out the profound, ancient relationship between humans and trees has been the botanist’s life’s work. It’s a result of a sui generis education: After her parents died when she was a child, Beresford-Kroeger was fed both works of modern science and ancient Druidic knowledge by the Irish aunts and uncles who raised her, before going on to train in botany, physics and medical biochemistry. In what’s being billed as a “culminating” book of essays, she lays out here how we can and must save ourselves from climate catastrophe.Climate Hope, David Geselbracht (Douglas & McIntyre, October) If the only sin is despair, then, in this time of climate crisis, surely we’ve all been sinners. Aiming to mitigate the pervasive ennui, Geselbracht – a B.C.-based lawyer who has worked on climate-change issues in the context of academia, journalism and government – travelled the globe to meet the diverse people leading the charge on reducing carbon emissions.

Latitudes, Jean McNeil (Barbican, November) After 30 years of planet-roaming – she’s penned a Lonely Planet guide to Costa Rica, spent four months at a research station in Antarctica (leading to the prize-winning book Ice Diaries), led safaris in Africa, and spent time in the Falkland Islands and Canada’s boreal forest – the Nova Scotia-born writer found that she kept hearing a “voice,” familiar from long ago, that she felt strongly was related to the land. She wrote this book to find out what it was saying.Power Metal, Vince Beiser (Riverhead, November) When he bought his first electrical vehicle, Beiser, a Canadian-American journalist, was filled with a crusading sense of virtue; until, that is, he started probing the source of the raw materials – lithium, cobalt, nickel – needed to power it and his digital devices. It was a rude awakening to learn that the hunt for the resources necessary for a “clean” future are “spawning massive environmental damage, political upheaval, mayhem, and murder.”

The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer (Simon & Schuster, November) Her first book since her unlikely 2013 blockbuster, Braiding Sweetgrass, continues the Indigenous botanist’s focus on sustainability with a look at how the reciprocity, interconnectedness and abundance embodied in the serviceberry shrub offers an antidote to an economy that encourages the opposite.JOURNALISM

A Nation’s Paper: The Globe and Mail in the Life of Canada, John Ibbitson, ed. (McClelland & Stewart, October) Thirty essays by Globe writers and staff explore the role the paper has played, since its founding by George Brown 180 years ago, in the life of the nation through its coverage of issues such as the environment, the General Motors strike of 1937, as well as its failures, including paying inadequate attention to topics such as the treatment of Indigenous people in residential schools, and to the plight of Nova Scotia’s Africville.Montreal Standard Time: Early Journalism, Mavis Gallant (Véhicule, October) For six years, starting in 1944, before she moved to Paris to fulfill her destiny as one of the greatest short-story writers in the English language, Gallant was the most widely read columnist at the Montreal Standard newspaper. “We can discern,” writes co-editor Neil Besner of this curated selection of pieces from that period, “her first steps towards developing what was to become her singular narrative style – that rich alloy of irony, deadpan humour, minutely reported detail, and lyrical intensity that is hers alone.”

What She Said: Conversations About Equality, Elizabeth Renzetti (McClelland & Stewart, October) Renzetti’s first piece for The Globe (then sometimes referred to as “The Globe and Old White Male”) was a furious rebuttal to an anti-feminist screed in the paper’s then extant “Men’s column.” The variations she wrote on that column, here collected and selected, over the next 30 years – on topics ranging from the pay gap to IPV to the MeToo movement – are what she calls “the world’s longest and most irritating Groundhog Day.”MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY

The Beautiful Dream, Atiba Hutchinson with Dan Robson (Viking) This is the life story of the humble man widely regarded as one of the best and most accomplished soccer players in Canadian soccer history. Hutchinson rose from humble beginnings in suburban Brampton, Ont., where he was born to Trinidadian immigrant parents in 1983, to playing for European teams, and captaining Canada’s national soccer team.The Traitor’s Daughter, Roxana Spicer (Viking) Growing up in her tiny Saskatchewan town (population 80), the documentary filmmaker and CBC journalist says there were plenty of signs her secretive mother was unusual. She listened to the Red Army Choir while sipping Black Russians at night, and pitched kitchen knives across the room into a perfect circle on the wall. In this history-laced memoir, Spicer gives an account of her decades-long effort to string together her mother’s past as a Red Army combat soldier, and as a prisoner in a Nazi POW camp before marrying Spicer’s father, a Canadian soldier.

Hope by Terry Fox, Barbara Adhiya, ed. (ECW, September) Adhiya creates a panoptic view of Fox through this collection of stories, some never before told, by the people in his direct orbit – including medical staff, childhood friends, a girlfriend and Fox’s training partner – all of whom remain, even 40 years later, profoundly affected by their contact with the Marathon of Hope runner.Leonard Cohen, Christophe Lebold (ECW, September) Adding to the growing corpus of Cohen biographies comes this newly translated one by a French academic and friend of Cohen’s that takes a more free-roaming metaphysical and philosophical approach to its subject. Lebold is particularly taken with the metaphors of gravity and falling that run through Cohen’s life and work, and with the many dualities in Cohen’s persona: romantic/monk; poet/musician etc.

Raising Hare, Chloe Dalton (Canongate, October) The discovery, while she was spending the pandemic lockdown in the country, of a tiny, barely alive leveret (the very satisfying word for a baby hare), and her subsequent raising of it in preparation for its release back into the wild compelled the author to reassess her priorities, including her addiction to her travel-filled, adrenalin-fuelled job as a foreign policy expert. In this tender, but in no way sentimental account (the hare throughout remains “the hare” or “leveret”), Dalton describes the remarkable bond she developed with this wild creature.i heard a crow before i was born, Jules Delorme (Goose Lane, October) In this raw, stream-of-consciousness memoir, Delorme, a Mohawk who grew up on the Akwesasne Reserve near Cornwall, Ont., describes himself as having been “an abnormally quiet and serious child diagnosed as autistic later as asperger’s that’s what they called it then and dyslexic and very very angry.” He goes on to describe a violent, abusive childhood (related to the intergenerational trauma of residential schools), and the two things that helped mitigate it: his beloved tóta (grandmother), and his lifelong connection to animals.

The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV, Helen Castor (S&S, October) The Cambridge historian and broadcaster’s hefty four-part book serves as both a twinned psychological portrait and a chronicle of the decades-long power struggle – “a moment of political masculinity in crisis” – between not-kissing cousins Richard II, a tyrannical narcissist with birthright on his side, and Henry IV, a natural leader inconveniently lacking said birthright.Didion & Babitz, Lili Anolik (Scriber, November) Anolik had already written a biography of the hotwired Eve Babitz when she discovered a letter Babitz wrote to her fellow writer and temperamental opposite, Joan Didion. In this dual portrait, she describes the women as frenemies who once both lived in a derelict rental building that was a hotbed for artists and writers in late-sixties L.A., and whose relationship came to an official end in 1974, when Babitz fired Didion over edits to one of her books.SOCIETY AND SCIENCE

I Heard There Was a Secret Chord, Daniel J. Levitin (Norton) Though it’s something many of us likely feel intuitively, a belief in the healing powers of music can be traced back as far 20,000 years, to the Upper Paleolithic era. Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music), a leading cognitive psychologist, here shares the cutting-edge scientific research backing up those feelings and offers inspiring examples of how music therapy has helped those suffering from afflictions ranging from Parkinson’s disease to PTSD.At a Loss for Words, Carol Off (Random House) Language is by nature fluid, but around 2020 the long-time journalist became unnerved by what she saw as an increased stridency in the political discourse undermining a once-shared vocabulary. This book is a deep-dive look at six words – freedom, democracy, truth, woke, choice, taxes – that Off believes have been “hijacked, weaponized or semantically bleached.”

On Freedom, Timothy Snyder (Crown) The word “freedom” has been everywhere in this current U.S. election cycle; including, notably, in the Beyoncé track U.S. presidential hopeful Kamala Harris has been using as a walk-up song at her rallies. In a bookend to his 2017 On Tyranny, the Yale historian (who wrote much of it while in Ukraine, where freedom is far from an abstract concept) attempts to define the term, and in doing so suggests that Americans reframe freedom from a negative (freedom from) to a positive (freedom to).Invisible Prisons, Lisa Moore and Jack Whalen (Knopf, September) Moore was introduced to Whalen through a friend, who told her he had a story to tell. That story concerned the extreme physical and sexual abuse that he and many other children suffered at the Whitbourne Training School for Boys in Newfoundland in the early seventies – one to which Whalen, who is suing the government of Newfoundland and Labrador while battling cancer, wanted the world to bear witness.

Writer and director Megan Park named her new film ‘My Old Ass’ for a reason

Open this photo in gallery:Director Megan Park attends the My Old Ass premiere during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, on Jan. 20, in Park City, Utah.Matt Winkelmeyer/AFP/Getty ImagesI got a bit choked up talking to Canadian filmmaker Megan Park about the new comic drama she wrote and directed, My Old Ass, which opens Sept. 20. (We’ll get to that title in a minute.) For the long-ass life of this column, I have been asking, “Where are the women?” Listening to her made me feel they’re finally here.Park, 38, was born far from Hollywood, in rural Lindsay, Ont. Her dad was a dentist, her mom a teacher. But she went to theatre camp, took dance and music classes, began acting in plays at the age of 6. During her high-school summers – her parents were strict about not missing school – she did small roles in film and television. At 18, she deferred university, moved to Los Angeles and landed a starring role on the ABC Family show The Secret Life of the American Teenager. It ran for seven years, scored her a green card, opened doors.That’s a typical actor’s trajectory. Here’s where the new stuff comes in. Though successful, Park noticed in her peers a passion and drive she didn’t feel. Then, on the Canadian film The F Word (2013), she worked with an actor she admired, Zoe Kazan, who’d done some writing and directing. Kazan introduced Park to Sarah Treem, who was writing The Affair. Park also talked to Lena Dunham, who was riding high with Girls.“I didn’t go to film school, I didn’t know lenses, I didn’t know how to use Final Draft,” the screenwriting program, Park said in a recent video interview, sitting cross-legged on a bed in Los Angeles (she has a home there and in Toronto). “I didn’t have the confidence in myself.” But talking to those young women – finding inspiring peers – convinced her to try.She wrote and directed two shorts (while acting in numerous Christmas telefilms). She directed a few music videos, including Watch, off the first album of a precocious 16-year-old called Billie Eilish. “I went to her house and sat in her living room,” Park says, grinning. “Her mom brought us cookies, and she was like, ‘Mom, leave us alone!’ She was really fun and obviously a genius.”Around 2000, distraught over U.S. school shootings, Park sat down and wrote a script in two weeks, The Fallout, about the aftermath of an attack. “I was afraid to send it to my agents and managers – afraid to be the idiot actor who wrote something bad,” Park says. “They called its structure ‘untraditional,’ and I thought, ‘Yeah, because I don’t know structure!’ But people liked it. I’d gotten more experience reading scripts and being on set than I realized.”Here’s the next miracle: Her reps just assumed she would direct it. Park was nervous – “I think a lot of people, women especially, struggle with voicing their opinion and being afraid it’s wrong,” she says. But she hired savvy collaborators, many of them women, and learned from them. (Finneas O’Connell, Eilish’s brother, did the score. It stars Jenna Ortega, pre-Wednesday, and is available on HBO Max and Crave.)Along the way, Park married the actor and musician Tyler Hilton and had two children. During a family visit in Toronto, she started thinking about last times – the last day your entire family lives together before someone moves away; the last time you play pretend with your friends. “A big thing for me growing up was putting on Spice Girls and making up a dance, and recording it on our big – I’m dating myself, I’m old-ass – VHS,” she says. “One of those times was the last time.” She started to wonder, if she could counsel her younger self to pay attention to that last time, would that take the joy out of it? Or cement it better in memory?Open this photo in gallery:Maisy Stella in My Old Ass.Amazon PrimeSo she wrote My Old Ass: It’s Elliott’s (Maisy Stella, Nashville) last summer at her family’s cranberry operation in Muskoka, Ont., before going to university. During a magic-mushroom trip, she’s visited by her older self (Aubrey Plaza), who mysteriously warns her not to fall in love with Chad (Percy Hynes White). The film is funny and assured, with unforced, naturalistic performances – and then it takes a deeply emotional turn that’s entirely earned. (Parents, prepare to be shredded by Elliott’s mother’s [Maria Dizzia] monologue about wishing she could recall the last time she rocked Elliott to sleep.)“I love Boyhood, Eighth Grade, any scripted movie that makes you feel you’re in a slice of life,” Park says. To achieve that, “you have to collaborate with people who understand that’s what you’re trying to do, and set that vibe when you shoot. There’s so much ego and hierarchy on film sets that doesn’t create an artistic environment. I was on so many sets like that as an actor, and I hated it. It’s my personal nightmare to ever be on a set like that again, let alone create one.”Park speaks so much about relying on her collaborators, in fact, that I feel compelled to point out her modesty, and urge her to own her talent. “For me, it’s all about why I’m doing it,” she replies. “I’m not making movies to put my artistry all over something and show the world. If a movie of mine speaks to someone, that’s a beautiful thing, but it’s not the ultimate reason I’m doing it. These stories come to me, and I love the process, working out things in my head and heart and life. If things go well, you won’t see me in front of the camera again – maybe one day, if I get to do it with friends. I feel I found my true love in writing and directing. I feel like it’s exactly what I was meant to do.” I’m not crying, you’re crying.Now, about that title. As Park wrote her early drafts, the title served as a tongue-in-cheek reminder to be “a little rebellious, to push myself. It was a north star. But I thought there was no way it would stay.”But like everything else Park is doing these days, people liked it: her agents and managers, her producers, financers and cast, and ultimately, the buyers at Amazon MGM Studios. “It snuck past all the gates, which I truly cannot believe,” she says. She could be describing herself, and all the women writer/directors who’ve waited so long. “But they just printed the poster, so I think we’re good.”