Don’t miss your last chance (for now!) to see Hanif Abdurraqib discuss his instant New York Times bestseller There’s Always This Year!
A powerful and mesmerizing reflection on basketball, life, and home, There’s Always This Year brims with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. The New York Times said, “There’s Always This Year is about basketball as much as Titanic is about a lost necklace; it’s about Columbus and LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers, but it’s also about beauty and loss and time— which is to say, it’s about everything.”
Join us on June 26 at 7:30 PM ET as Hanif sits down with his friend Clint Smith, #1 New York Times bestselling author of How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America and the poetry collection Above Ground for a conversation about belonging, writing poetry and prose, and basketball.
Plus, don’t miss an exclusive pre-show Q&A with Hanif and his editor Ben Greenberg and Maya Millett starting at 7:00 PM ET. To access this social segment where Hanif will be answering questions you submit in advance, simply purchase the book with ticket option. Books purchased with this ticket will also include a signed bookplate by Hanif. All sales support our independent bookstore partner, Solid State Books, in Washington, DC. Tickets to the main conversation are free.
We can’t wait for you to join us!
Event Details
There's Always This Year
On Basketball and Ascension
Hanif Abdurraqib
“Mesmerizing . . . not only the most original sports book I’ve ever read but one of the most moving books I’ve ever read, period.”—Steve James, director of Hoop Dreams
Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s, Hanif Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron James 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 tension between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with intimate, personal storytelling. “Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father’s jump shot,” Abdurraqib writes. “The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.”
There’s Always This Year is a triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject of his keen focus—whether it’s basketball, or music, or performance—Hanif Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.
