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Madeleine Thien, the daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants, lives in Quebec City, Canada. Her first novel, Certainty, has just been published in the United States. The book is ripe with juxtapositions.

Director Lasse Hallstrom's new movie, The Hoax, chronicles Clifford Irving's attempt to publish the "autobiography" of Howard Hughes.

The Lookout, a thriller starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, invests more than the usual amount of effort in developing characters. It marks the directing debut of Scott Frank, known for his writing work.

Was Hamlet criminally responsible for killing his ex-girlfriend's father, Polonius? That is the question argued in a mock trial, part of a Shakespeare festival in Washington, D.C. Lawyers Abbe Lowell and Miles Ehrlich presented oral arguments before a jury.

Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter's novel Point of Impact has been made into Shooter, a film starring Mark Wahlberg. Hunter talks about what it's like to endure reviews.

Terry Gilliam's Tideland was panned by film critics and audiences alike when it was released in 2005. But he hopes the disturbing tale of a girl, whose parents are drug addicts, finds an audience on DVD.

In Venus, Peter O'Toole plays the role of Maurice, an old actor whose career is reduced to playing corpses on TV medical dramas. O'Toole says the movie is about a "dirty, old man and young slut of a woman," but in deeper terms, explores age, youth and beauty.

Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris are the directing partners behind the Oscar-nominated dark comedy Little Miss Sunshine. But their favorite DVDs tend to be documentaries, including one about pet cemeteries.

The British have had a long love affair with American soul music. The Motown and Stax labels were popular in the London clubs of the 1960s, while "rare grooves," or obscure singles, were fuel for the Northern Soul movement of the 1970s and 1980s. These days, the British are making their own soul music.

On the closing day of the Renee Magritte exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Sunday, a guard noticed a peculiar sight: a Ziploc bag full of ladybugs. The bag was mysteriously left in the museum. A few ladybugs flew free before guards cleared them out. Even with galleries decorated with clouds on the floor and freeways on the ceiling, the little ladybugs were indeed a surreal surprise.