For a sport so full of stories, basketball is scarcely represented in literature, or at least literature for adults. When we do get a basketball book, it’s usually full of statistics or reportage. Acclaimed author Hanif Abdurraqib’s latest, There’s Always This Year (a joke basketball fans will get), is more about relationships: a fan’s relationship to a player or a team; a player’s relationship to a city; a son’s relationship to his father; our human relationship to our own mortality.There’s Always This Year follows two people, primarily—Hanif Abdurraqib and LeBron James—in and outside of the place(s) they call home. Abdurraqib, a Columbus native who grew up playing not far from LeBron, is the perfect person to write about the King, and he brings to this book his usual mix of insight, humor, beauty, and joy. There’s Always This Year comes on the heels of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America and the New York Times bestseller Go Ahead in the Rain.It isn’t your usual basketball story. “I can tell you about guys who didn’t hoop to get away from the streets, or to get out of anywhere,” Abdurraqib writes. “Guys who hooped because they wanted to be respected on the streets they loved. They wanted to make themselves infamous in the place that held them, and that, too, is a type of making it. People just looking for a place to feel invincible, for a few hours, in a city that might otherwise swallow them whole.”Abdurraqib… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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