There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
bdurraqib uses one subject as a lens through which he views the culture at large — it's about hoops, sure, but it's also about so much more. It's another remarkable book from one of the country's smartest cultural critics ... Abdurraqib's chronicle of the game is fascinating, but it's his analysis of James — as a person, a baller, a phenomenon — that shines ... Another brilliant book from Abdurraqib, who has firmly established himself as one of the country's most original and talented authors. It's also a piercing look at how we consider others, as well as ourselves.
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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 ... Embarking upon a dizzying mix of genres within the same work sometimes results in wandering focus and formal meanderings that lead the reader astray into Abdurraqib’s dreamlike musings ... But it’s the vast stretches that he pulls off marrying the tenets of memoir, biography, and criticism with evocative kindness and incisive precision that make it feel as though this was the book that Abdurraqib was destined to write ... Abdurraqib also offers a nuanced line of thought that forces the reader to recontextualize their definition of success in the face of insurmountable pressure ... It hits as though you’re listening to someone you love ramble about the only thing that matters to them ... There’s a large part of you that wants him to stay on this path until he runs out of ink.
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Abdurraqib’s willingness to pile everything he’s able into his quasi-autobiographical, proto-philosophical inquiry into turn-of-the-twenty-first-century basketball ... In no way a conventional biography or appreciation of one athlete’s career. It is more a portrait of Abdurraqib-the-artist as a young man ... He is a poet. He is also, in this book, more formally audacious with prose than he’s ever been before.
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