Description: "While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a gifted poet, and one of our culture's most insightful music critics, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan. Growing up in Columbus in the '90s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron 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 memoir: 'Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father's jumpshot,' Abdurraqib writes. 'The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time'"
Review Quotes: "Hanif Abdurraqib writes: You are, in part, who loves you. I've never read a book more full of love--heartbreaking, poetic, rapturous--than There's Always This Year. He loves basketball, his court, his block, his city, but most of all, his people, and he beautifully shares it in this indelible and mesmerizing book. Abdurraqib has written not only the most original sports book I've ever read but one of the most moving books I've ever read, period. . . . Utterly transcendent."--Steve James, director of Hoop Dreams
"Hanif Abdurraqib again shows us new ways to be a social critic, a dreamer, a historian, and a lover of hoop. But--and this feels especially moving--he shows us how he wonders about, and how he is transformed in the wondering about, what it means to belong to a place. And you know by place I mean the people, the memories, the sorrows, the tomorrows, who are that place. And you know by all that I mean the love."--Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights