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's experience as a player and journalist, roaming NBA locker rooms and city parks as a basketball flaneur in search of the meaning of the modern game. He captures the magnificence and mastery of today’s most accomplished NBA players while paying homage to the devotion of countless congregants in the global church of pickup basketball. He shares his own stories from the courts, 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 slightly talented player whose main gift is being tall, Lost in the Game charts the game’s inexorable gravitational hold on those who love it.
About the Author
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, Seduction Theory, and other books.
Industry Reviews
"In Lost in the Game Thomas Beller conveys through a collection of essays the intense, often internalized dynamics of playground basketball, where he used impromptu games to test his strength and emotional mettle." -- Oskar Garcia * New York Times Book Review *
"This book is stuffed with great writing. An engrossing chronicle of a love affair with basketball. A must-read for all NBA fans."
-- Colin Chappell * Library Journal *
"[A] heartfelt ode to the game. . . . Beller champions the sport as a lens through which to view life, and his devotion to it is palpable throughout. . . . Basketball aficionados will get swept up in this incisive study." * Publishers Weekly *
"To interest casual fans and non-fans . . . Lost in the Game is like an autobiographical novel, a bildungsroman of belated, decades-long development. Serious fans of the NBA will find Lost in the Game is rich with reportage, some of which brings back players perhaps lost or dimmed in memory such as former Knicks Latrell Spreewell, Stephon Marbury, and Zach Randolph, who epitomizes the clever low-leaper in 'The Pleasures of the Old Man Game,' one of Beller's best 'historical' essays. Beller is equally good on micro-analyzing the distinctive moves of current dancing dribblers such as James Harden and Kyrie Irving. Their secret, Beller argues counterintuitively, is not in their movements but in their ability to stop while their defenders continue to move." -- Tom LeClair * Open Letters *
"Everyone with hoop dreams will enjoy Lost in the Game: a Book about Basketball, by Tulane University's Thomas Beller, which brings together his writing about the sport, whether you love the NBA or the pick-up game in the neighborhood park. And yes, he has thoughts on Anthony Davis and Zion Williamson." -- Susan Larson * NOLA.com *
"Playground basketball is urban life in microcosm. We all have to get along with strangers in public spaces. Sometimes it goes well and sometimes it gets tense, and occasionally even violent. You find out who you are and aren't very quickly. Lost in the Game may be the best book ever written on this democratic but friction-rich aspect of playground basketball." -- Gerald Howard * Air Mail *
"It's rare that writers on basketball criss-cross their attention from playground and pickup ball to the NBA. . . . Beller has watched the game so closely and well that he is able to describe and appreciate professionals' idiosyncratic talents as finely as a ballet critic. . . .Though the individual pieces were not written as a collection, and very occasionally overlap, Beller has made them gel like members of a team that's really clicking." -- Bob Blaisdell * Brooklyn Daily Eagle *
"More than any writer I've ever read, Beller captures the joy, pressure, and almost narcotic escape that pickup basketball offers. . . . If you're a fan of basketball, you will enjoy this book. And if you happen to belong, as I do, to that odd slice of Venn diagram consisting of people who appreciate a great sentence just as much as they appreciate a nice bounce pass in traffic, you'll love these essays even more." -- Burke Nixon * Southwest Review *
"Lost in the Game includes several humorous, psychologically probing profiles of the NBA's biggest luminaries. . . . 'The Jokic Files' merits mention for anyone who even casually follows the NBA. . . . Beyond the NBA chapters, what is of most interest for those of us past our primes or, at the very least, no longer full of hoop dreams, are his tales of being a 'late bloomer,' someone who came into his own only as an adult, and for his attention to the peculiar lingo and unspoken rules of street basketball." -- Max Blaisdell * Chicago Reader *
"Lost in the Game entertainingly demonstrates all the excitement, intensity, and uncertainty that comes with playing pickup. But what's most gratifying about the book is its articulation and understanding of those ambiguous feelings one may have about over-caring about basketball later in one's life." -- Christopher Urban * Cleveland Review of Books *
"Beller is both self-reflective and sharply observant, heartfelt and magnanimous. . . . Lost in the Game is an illuminating and unexpectedly poignant collection of essays, traversing the worlds of both professional basketball and pickup games." -- Deborah Vankin * Los Angeles Times *
