Jazz
Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio

There’s Always This Year

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.

More Adult, Non-Juvenile Books

  • New York Times bestselling author John Scalzi flies you to the moon with his most fantastic tale to date: When the Moon Hits Your Eye.

  • In When We Flew Away, critically acclaimed author Alice Hoffman tells the poignant story of Anne Frank during the harrowing times of World War II. As the Nazi occupation forces Anne and her family into hiding, she discovers her own identity and voice amidst the chaos, ultimately becoming a symbol of resilience and hope.

    Read More about "When We Flew Away"...

  • An award-winning historian shows how girls who found self-understanding in the natural world became women who changed America.

  • George Willard is a young reporter on the Winesburg Eagle to whom, one by one, the inhabitants of Winesburg, Ohio, confide their hopes, their dreams, and their fears. This town of friendly but solitary people comes to life as Anderson’s special talent exposes the emotional undercurrents that bind its people together. In this timeless cycle of short stories, he lays bare the life of a small town in the American Midwest.