There's Always This Year
On Basketball and Ascension
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4.3 • 14 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “powerful” (The Guardian) reflection on basketball, life, and home—from the author of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America
“Mesmerizing . . . not only the most original sports book I’ve ever read but one of the most moving books I’ve ever read, period.”—Steve James, director of Hoop Dreams
ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Vulture, Chicago Public Library, BookPage
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, The Washington Post, NPR, The Boston Globe, The New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Book Riot, Electric Lit
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s, Hanif Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron James were forged and countless others weren’t. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tension between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with intimate, personal storytelling. “Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father’s jump shot,” Abdurraqib writes. “The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.”
There’s Always This Year is a triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject of his keen focus—whether it’s basketball, or music, or performance—Hanif Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.
LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With the precision of a star point guard, author Hanif Abdurraqib explains why for him, basketball is more than just a game in this fantastic collection of personal essays. As a proud Ohioan, Abdurraqib explores why the Cavaliers mean so much both to him and to his whole community—and why he’s so in awe of LeBron James. But much like he did with the subject of music in A Little Devil in America, Abdurraqib ultimately uses basketball as a jumping-off point for a conversation about much larger issues, approaching every topic with a deeply compelling personal perspective. (As someone who’s been incarcerated himself, his pain is palpable when he gets into the epidemic of police shooting Black men.) When it comes to writing about sports as a metaphor for life, There’s Always This Year is the gold standard.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cultural critic Abdurraqib (A Little Devil in America) returns with a triumphant meditation on basketball and belonging. Serving as a love letter to Abdurraqib's hometown of Columbus, Ohio, and the state more broadly, the book is structured like a basketball game, divided into four "quarters" with game clock time stamps demarcating section breaks. The first quarter describes the collective ecstasy Columbus felt during a 2002 game in which the city's nationally ranked high school basketball team held its own against an Akron team featuring up-and-comer LeBron James. Abdurraqib suggests the Columbus team's respectable showing (they lost in overtime) asserted the greater community's pride in spite of politicians and police who called Black Columbus neighborhoods "war zones." Elsewhere, the author considers the "era of Ohio Heartbreak" that followed James's decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat in 2010, and offers a lyrical account of the protests that followed Columbus police's 2016 killing of 23-year-old Black man Henry Green. (He writes of the makeshift shrine on the sidewalk where Green was shot: "Whatever is left behind dries and turns a dark crimson, the wayward light from candles flickering over what remains—a strange kind of memorial, a strange kind of haunting.") The narrative works as if by alchemy, forging personal anecdotes, sports history, and cultural analysis into a bracing contemplation of the relationship between sport teams and their communities. This is another slam dunk from Abdurraqib.
