There’s Always This Year

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“A dunk contest is where one goes to execute some far-flung dream of what the body is capable of. It is where one goes to fail, often spectacularly,” writes Hanif Abdurraqib, in this lyrical work that combines personal narrative with sports writing and an homage to his Ohio hometown.

book cover with boy sitting on top of outdoor basketball rim

Unfolding in four sections, each one time-stamped to mimic the 12 minutes of a quarter, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension asks us to think about what it means to make it, who we think is worthy of success, the tension between expectation and excellence, and the very notion of role models.

Hanif Abdurraqib holds flowers in headshot photo

A poet, essayist, and winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant, Mr. Abdurraqib is the author of five previous books, including They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us and A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and which won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

Because you don’t have to know anything about basketball to fall in love with this book, which is as intricate and surprising as a work of origami.

Is There’s Always This Year really a basketball book? “It’s a bit of a fake out,” admits Hanif Abdurraqib in his Living Writers podcast.

Hanif Abdurraqib at Colgate

Join us in person or via Zoom on Thursday, Sept. 12, for an on-stage interview of Hanif Abdurraqib, followed by an audience Q&A and book-signing. All Living Writers events take place at 4:30 ET in Persson Auditorium. Refreshments available.

Beyond the Book

  • “As in his previous books, Abdurraqib 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,” writes Michael Schaub in this NPR review.
  • Hanif Abdurraqib has “a gift for recognizing the underlying structure of an emotion and pointing to its different manifestations, like a biologist alerting you to the Fibonacci sequence in pine cones and seashells, only for matters of the soul,” writes Giri Nathan, in this Vulture profile.
  • If reading There’s Always This Year makes you want to rewatch the iconic final minutes of Game 7 of the 2016 NBA championships, here they are!
  • Toby Wolfson ’25 created this playlist of songs mentioned in There’s Always This Year.

“I would like to be granted an audience with the architect of longing.”

 

Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year