In the first full trailer for the Divergent sequel, Tris (Shailene Woodley) is forced to fight the scariest enemy yet: herself.
It seems important.
Lionsgate
Lionsgate
Lionsgate
“I had no idea she was back in town,” Valerie said as she sipped her Cosmopolitan and studied Zach’s eyes while Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” played over the restaurant’s sound system.
Ira Madison III for BuzzFeed / Via Simon & Schuster
Amidst protests against police brutality, Daniel José Older returns to a favorite novel and explores the misreading of rage.
Justine Zwiebel / BuzzFeed
Two weeks ago, marching through the streets with a thousand other people, our open hands raised to the nighttime skyscrapers, I thought of Oscar Wao. Across the country, protesters shut down bridges and highways and raised a collective voice of dissent, which the media quickly simplified into a rage-filled sound bite and simulcasted across the world over images of cop cars burning in the streets of Ferguson.
Toward the end of Junot Díaz's The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Oscar marches through a cane field to what he's sure will be his death. He sends telepathic messages of love to his mom, his tío, his sister Lola, and all the women he ever loved: "Olga, Maritza, Ana, Jenni, Karen, and all the other ones whose names he'd never known — and of course to Ybón."
On Nov. 24, prosecutor Bob McCulloch told the world that the broad-daylight murder of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown didn't warrant so much as a trial. The same day, Marissa Alexander began her prison sentence for firing a warning shot while defending herself from domestic abuse. Policemen had killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice the Saturday before and Akai Gurley the week before that. Last Tuesday, a grand jury here in New York decided that Eric Garner's death by strangulation at the hands of the New York Police Department also wasn't worth a trial. Before that it was Ramarley Graham, Rekia Boyd, 7-year-old Aiyana Jones, all unarmed, and many, many more. The U.S. judicial system has made it clear that blackness itself is a capital offense and doesn't deserve the benefit of a trial.
And now let's draw lines. As two of the original organizers of the Black Lives Matter Freedom Rides, Patrisse Cullors and Darnell L. Moore write: "We could not allow Ferguson to be portrayed as an aberration in America: it must remain understood as a microcosm of the effects of anti-black racism." And indeed, the tentacles of this deep-seated anti-blackness are woven into the DNA of the American dream. We see it in law enforcement, politics, the media, social justice movements, non-black communities of color, science, and, of course, literature. On Nov. 19, the night before police killed unarmed Akai Gurley in a Brooklyn stairwell, Daniel Handler made his racist watermelon quip toward Jacqueline Woodson as he presented her with a National Book Award. It was interpersonal anti-blackness that led him to make such a statement. Institutional anti-blackness had his back. Neither NPR nor the New York Times bothered to mention it in their coverage of the award ceremony. The Times called his performance "edgy and entertaining." The National Book Foundation itself didn't apologize until a few days of continued social media outcry. Prominent members of the publishing community posted blogs in sympathy with Handler, while many others simply remained silent.
"This mission is what's been passed down to me —" Jacqueline Woodson writes in her essay responding to the watermelon joke, "to write stories that have been historically absent in this country's body of literature, to create mirrors for the people who so rarely see themselves inside contemporary fiction, and windows for those who think we are no more than the stereotypes they're so afraid of." The publishing industry, which by its own count is 1% black and 3% Latino, dropped the ball once again, and writers and readers of color rolled our eyes and cycled between outrage and not even being surprised. Woodson's essay contextualizes the joke perfectly: In 2014, people of color are still struggling to see ourselves in literature. As BuzzFeed's own Ashley Ford writes, "Brown girls everywhere know what it means to choke with invisible hands at their throats, to drown with water nowhere in sight. For us, a book like [Woodson's] Brown Girl Dreaming is air itself."
In this case, overwhelming silence in the face of explicit racism was the institutional wink and nod: the go-ahead. The same wink and nod, though much more lethal, could be seen in the refusal of grand juries and prosecutors to investigate the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The institutional go-ahead, be it in publishing or the court system, amounts to an abusive, racialized deprivation of human rights. It is violence. But in the upside-down anti-poetry of power, violence becomes simply an act, a momentary physical explosion, the culminating event. And so, in the midst of a historically rooted, state-sanctioned attack on black lives, everyone from the president to the very police department responsible for Michael Brown's death has demanded protesters avoid violence. This is like a pyromaniac telling a fireman not to smoke a cigarette.
Justine Zwiebel / BuzzFeed
Thinking of the many fucked up flavors of violence, my whole body thrumming with rage and sorrow, I sought solace in my bookshelf. It took a little while to find — so many sugarcoat and simplify; they tiptoe and coddle when we need books that break-dance and tell hard truths. Gradually, voices emerged: Baldwin and Butler and Morrison. John Murillo's "Enter the Dragon." And, of course, Oscar Wao.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a book you devour slowly. You savor each bite because you're not sure what the world will look like when it's done. When I first read it in 2007, it was a revelation: a promise written in unflinching poetic vernacular that we can speak complex literary truths without translating ourselves or over-explaining or condescending to the lowest common denominator. It lit a fire under my ass, so many of our asses, that propelled us down the road to becoming writers.
In the canefield, Oscar tells the gunmen that they were going to take a great love out of the world. "Love is a rare thing," Oscar says as he raises his hands, "easily confused with a million other things." Michael Brown raised his hands too, but he wasn't given the benefit of last words.
It is easy to misread rage as hate. This week, as chants of "Black lives matter" echoed once more through the streets of New York, Ferguson, Los Angeles and out into the world, all I could think of was love. Maybe, before he died, Michael thought of love too. And maybe that thought telegraphed brightly across this country, woke us up, rustled us out into the streets as one, loving, rage-filled outcry. As Oscar said, "on the other side…anything you can dream…you can be."
“Oh hello, Chris Pratt.”
Warner Bros.
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Warner Bros./Andrew Toth /Stringer/Thinkstock/Loryn Brantz/BuzzFeed
Submitted by - kategrace90.
Warner Bros./Thinkstock/Loryn Brantz/BuzzFeed
Pamela Paul conducts one of her infamous “By the Book” interviews… on herself.
In celebration of her new book, By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from The New York Times Book Review, we asked Pamela Paul to answer the questions she's usually asking some of the world's most talented writers.
Earl Wilson / New York Times
What books are currently on your nightstand?
Pamela Paul: Right now, I'm reading Moss Hart's marvelous memoir, Act One, a delight on so many levels. I saw the play based on the book earlier this year, and had been meaning to read it ever since. Now that we've got our Notables and Best Books picked for the year, I can do a little "freelance reading." Also, among books published quite a while ago, John Le Carre's A Perfect Spy, which I was inspired to turn to after reading Ben Macintyre's hugely entertaining A Spy Among Friends earlier this year. I still want to read Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson, which came out last year. And I haven't read Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, also on the pile.
Children's books too: The Little House books, which I'm reading aloud to my daughter at night. The first Harry Potter, which I am midway through re-reading as an ongoing project for my children's book club, Kidlit. I feel doubly inspired because my middle child just finished the books for the first time, and my eldest just re-read them a third time. I'm a slacker by comparison.
What are your favorite books of all time?
PP: I've got a long list, even though I'm just going to stick to the classics. First, the Russians: Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov. Short stories: "The Nose," "The Double." Another favorite story: "The Secret Sharer," by Joseph Conrad — I've always wanted to make it into a movie. I generally love stories at sea even though I don't particularly like being at sea — "Benito Cereno" is another. My favorite Edith Wharton by far is The House of Mirth and for George Eliot, I am tied between Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. I loved The Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks. The best book that made me cry was The Portrait of a Lady, and the books that have made me laugh more than any others were and still are Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five. Other random favorites: I adored Of Human Bondage, William Dean Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes, and A Modern Instance.
As for nonfiction: George Orwell's essays are still the very best. The Emperor of All Maladies by Sidddartha Mukherjee. Lenin's Tomb by David Remnick. Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon. Self-help: How to Talk So Kids Will Listen ... And Listen So Kids Will Talk (works with grown-ups too).
I gobble up memoir and biography and so must subcategorize in order to do some justice. Memoir: Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy, Wild Swans by Jung Chang, Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng, Remembering Denny by Calvin Trillin, Present at the Creation by Dean Acheson, The Long Road to Freedom by Nelson Mandela, Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens, everything by Spalding Gray. Graphic memoir: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Stitches by David Small, Maus by Art Spiegelman. Biography: The Power Broker. Literary biography: Richard Ellmann on Oscar Wilde.
Comics: Claire Bretécher's Les Frustrées. She and Roz Chast graphically narrate my life.
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The New "Insurgent" Trailer Shows Tris Fighting For Her Life, Again