Lost in the Game Beller

Lost in the Game

A Book about Basketball THOMAS BELLER

“This is a love song to basketball and its players. At turns fascinating and funny, tenderness beats at the heart of this book in the finely wrought portrayals of the characters: an assassin here, a trash-talking big man there, who transcend and become gods on the court before descending to the page.”—JESMYN WARD

For players, coaches, writers, and fans, basketball is a science and an art, a religious sacrament, a source of entertainment and a way of interacting with the world. In Lost in the Game Thomas Beller entwines these threads with his lifetime experience as a player and journalist, roaming nba locker rooms and city parks alike as a basketball flâneur in search of the meaning of the modern game. He captures the magnificence and mastery of today’s most accomplished nba players, from Lebron James and Damian Lillard to Steph Curry and James Harden, while paying homage to the devotion of the countless congregants in the global church of pickup basketball. He shares his own stories on the court, meditating on basketball’s role in city life and its impact on the athlete’s psyche as he moves from youth to middle age. Part journalistic account, part memoir of a somewhat talented player whose main gift is being tall, Lost in the Game charts the game’s inexorable gravitational hold on those who love it.

Lost in the Game A Book about Basketball Thomas Beller

November 240 pages paper, 978-1-4780-1883-4 $22.95tr/£17.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-1617-5 $84.95/£68.00 Rights: North America

Thomas Beller is Associate Professor of English at Tulane University, a regular contributor to the New Yorker, and the author of J. D. Salinger: The Escape Artist, How to Be a Man: Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood, and Seduction Theory, and other books.