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There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
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About This Book
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 tensions 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.
Reviews
"An innovative memoir encompassing sports, mortality, belonging, and home."
"Abdurraqib has found an entertaining way to make the act of watching sport akin to witnessing miracles."
"This is another slam dunk from Abdurraqib."
"He is also, in this book, more formally audacious with prose than he's ever been before."
"[A] unique, memoir-propelled, far-ranging, and affecting inquiry ..."
"With carefully constructed and imaginative prose, he immerses us in the basketball culture of his native East Columbus, Ohio, telling stories of hoop dreams, both deferred and fully realized ..."
"There's Always This Year arrives as a masterful trick play draped in love and sincerity, with the poet and essayist using basketball as a conduit to pen a dedication to the place that he's from, an ode to the sport and city that raised and loved him, and an examination of what it means to "make it" from somewhere ..."
"It's also a piercing look at how we consider others, as well as ourselves."
"Fans of Abdurraqib and basketball will enjoy the book."
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