I’m notorious for refusing to choose favorites. I don’t like to limit myself. But if you really pressed me to pick a favorite author—a living, currently working author, let’s say—I would quickly spit out a name. That name would be Hanif Abdurraqib.
If you have not yet begun your journey into Hanif Abdurraqib’s body of work, I’ll tell you now that I’m both a little incensed—What have you been waiting for?—and also a little jealous, because you are about to have the life-altering experience of coming to him for the first time. His command of language will wash over you like a tidal wave and the minute, unassailable truths he can find in everything from your favorite song to a game of Spades will cut right through to the bone, lodge inside you, and live forever. Likely as not, you’ll quickly find yourself feeling like you’re catching up with an old friend. An old friend who is also the wisest person in the universe.
Maybe this sounds like hyperbole, but I’m telling you: Reading Hanif Abdurraqib is an experience that can easily drive a person to the use of superlatives.
If you are, indeed, new to his work, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, which was released in late March, is a very good place to start. It is perhaps his most personal work to date, but it may also be his most universal yet.
I don’t really know all that much about basketball. But of course, you really don’t need to in order to get something out of There’s Always This Year. This is the point where I might say something trite like, “This isn’t really a book about basketball,” but that wouldn’t be true at all: Abdurraqib is a passionate fan and sometime player of the game, and this book is infused with a deep knowledge and love of players, teams, seasons, and individual, long-odds moments—some far in the past, some barely remembered by those who weren’t there. But, in his masterful hands, a love letter to basketball very quickly becomes all that and more: a book about, as best I can distill it, community—about having a community, about loving that community even when it isn’t perfect, even when you’re the underdogs, even when you fail that community, or it fails you. It’s about losing a community, and about longing for what you’ve lost, and about returning, or at least trying to. It’s about incarceration and freedom, about leaving and about staying.
Abdurraqib is a child of Ohio—Columbus, to be exact—and so his own life has been punctuated not only by pickup games played with childhood friends, rivals, and heroes at makeshift courts across the city, but by the triumphs and tragedies of the teams that defined the region at every level, from Akron’s St. Vincent-St. Mary High School to the Cleveland Cavaliers. So many of those triumphs and tragedies are touchstones for times of personal joy, loss, turmoil, and redemption. As Abdurraqib observes, time and again, so many stories in so many communities are defined by who leaves—who “gets out”—and by who returns. Throughout the book, his own journey out and back is juxtaposed with that of one of Ohio’s favorite sons, LeBron James. When you are part of a community, whether a city, a team, or a fandom, you can’t help but be connected to everyone you share that community with.
I still hate choosing favorites, and reading back through what I’ve written about There’s Always This Year, I’m not sure I’ve come any closer to illuminating the transcendent and beautiful qualities of Hanif Abdurraqib’s writing. He’s a rare author I feel so strongly about that I have trouble, at times, articulating why. And perhaps I don’t need to: Perhaps my only job here is to tell you to read him, as soon as you can.
Sam and Emma Kaas own and run the Norwich Bookstore.