Hanif Abdurraqib Knows What Makes Basketball Great

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.