| Tuesday, June 16, 2020 | | The headlines make you want to crawl back under the duvet? Well, have no fear: OZY is here with some great writing to get you through your day. They’re not all breezy beach reads, but they’ll each take you to a new place — not bad for a Tuesday, right? — and perhaps provide a bit of wisdom. |
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| | |  | 1. Born a Crime Daily Show host Trevor Noah’s memoir explores his childhood in South Africa, where the “crime” was being the product of an illegal interracial couple. The book is funny and poignant, like the comedian himself. |
| 2. Heavy Kiese Laymon’s raw memoir explores what it’s like to grow up Black and big in Mississippi. For readers looking to put themselves in someone else’s shoes right now, this is a winner.
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| 3. Tanking to the Top NBA fanatics, history buffs and anyone obsessed with hidden power struggles will love Yaron Weitzman’s new book on the Philadelphia 76ers. He goes deep on just how extreme “The Process” was, and how infighting, dueling egos and competing agendas with the team’s upper management ultimately upended the plan. Need more sports to get you through the pandemic? We’ve got you covered. |
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|  | the untrue (but cool) stuff |
| 1. IQ This is the first in a series by Joe Ide featuring Isaiah Quintabe, a modern-day African American incarnation of Sherlock Holmes. He’s a Southern California high school dropout who takes on cases the police won’t, taking readers on a wild ride. |
| 2. Ten Women Marcela Serrano has been winning literary prizes in Chile since the early ’90s but didn’t get translated into English until this 2011 novel. It melds the stories of nine women who share the same therapist (who’s the 10th woman!) into a book that functions almost as short stories and a novel at the same time. Find other overlooked female writers here.
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| 3. Weather In this new novel, Jenny Offill intrinsically understands the way climate change anxiety seeps into your bones, making it impossible to separate the weather from your personal world. The main characters, Lizzie and her husband, tap into global anxiety through podcasts. There are still lunches to make, backpacks to fill, sex to be had. The strength of Offill’s book is capturing the uneasy tension of our times, balancing global insecurity with everyday minutiae. Find more surprisingly hopeful climate change books here.
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| | | 5. The Red Tent Novelist Anita Diamant takes the brief Bible story of Dinah and envisions an entirely new world, for a rich piece of historical fiction on an overlooked type of protagonist. |
| 6. Disgrace J.M. Coetzee weaves a tale of a disgraced professor, an act of violence and a South African society still struggling to heal its racial wounds.
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| 7. Snow White: An Islamic Tale Fawzia Gilani-Williams’ specialty is taking Western classics and reimagining them for Muslim children, with the characters following Islamic codes. In this version, Snow White prays and fasts as part of her religious observance. And the seven dwarves are women.
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| | | 1. Shipping Out As coronavirus sent the cruise industry into choppy seas, David Foster Wallace might well have been grinning from the hereafter. His hilarious 1996 Harper’s gem was later given a better headline for a collection of his work: “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.”
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|  | 2. The Secret Life of Mia Hamm It’s hard to pick just one piece by the Sports Illustrated master Gary Smith, but we’ll take this 2003 trip into the immensely private life of one of the greatest athletes the world has ever known.
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| 3. Martin Luther King Is Still on the Case! Writer Gary Willis traveled to Memphis for Esquire shortly after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. His portrait of the man and the city is timeless. |
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| | |  | 1. The Crunch In times of doom and gloom, there is good news in the world — and this newsletter delivers it to its messianic subscribers. But not with cutesy stories at the end of the nightly news or ones that the Internet vows will “restore your faith in humanity.” This is the good news about science and technology, the kinds of things that will actually make this a better world.
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| 2. Sabato’s Crystal Ball University of Virginia’s Center for Politics — led by the ultimate talking head, Larry Sabato — puts out a data-heavy weekly dive into national politics for those who want to go deep and nerd out on numbers and trends. They’re also one of the premier forecasters for House, Senate and presidential elections.
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| 3. FierceBiotech Stay up to date on the latest advances in the fight against coronavirus and beyond with this daily insider snapshot into the sprawling field of biotech.
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