The Book Prize Index

There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

Hanif Abdurraqib

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. There's Always This Year is a triumph from one of America's most celebrated and insightful writers. It brims with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject, Abdurraqib's exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, and ourselves.

SportsSports · medium confidenceSports81 signalsLlm Classifier: Sports -> SportsGoogle Books: Biography & Autobiography -> Memoir & AutobiographyGoogle Books: Biography & Autobiography -> BiographySports Biography

Award History

1 wins · 3 total

AwardYearResultCategory / Notes
National Book Critics Circle Award for CriticismMajor2024WinnerSecondary source
Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in NonfictionMajor2025LonglistOfficial source
National Book Critics Circle Award for NonfictionMajor2024LonglistOfficial source
View all award history (3)
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies

This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.

  1. 01 Central figures

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

    These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.

    • LeBron James40%

  2. 02 Central places

    • Columbus, Ohio85%

  3. 03 Suggested argument

    No argument inferred with sufficient confidence.

    This suggestion did not meet the normal display threshold and is more likely to be wrong.

    The book argues that basketball’s role models and ideas of success reshape cultural expectations, and that rethinking who “makes it” requires balancing excellence with emotional and social realities.

    Model confidence 45%

  4. 04 Reading orientation

    35 / 100 academic

    Serious trade

    An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.

Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 80%.