After the Oracle

"After the Oracle is resolutely not a self-help book, but it is also the best self-help book you'll ever read. It is ostensibly a book about basketball — and yes, it is about basketball! — but it is also about the biggest questions in the world, like what it takes to love and how to build a life. Part love letter to The Game, part self-searching memoir, part philosophical treatise, ultimately it is a roadmap for a deep interrogation of the self that suggests how personal and political transformations may be truly possible. In the tradition of the greatest sports writing, it is expansive, hilarious, and profound — yet it is also uniquely Shane Anderson. Intricately constructed, deeply poetic, vulnerable, real. An ode to basketball; an ode to joy." –Elvia Wilk, author of Oval “In this work Shane Anderson mines from the moment values that escape beyond the exigencies that seem to cradle the moment. He mines from the athleticism that which insinuates value that seems to overcome the compost that seems to shadow the moment. A seeming instant in time is mined for stunning life lessons it provides emitted as they are from crucial tangents that seem to occlude their greater extension.” –Will Alexander "You can't fake the funk on a nasty dunk and Shane Anderson's post-oracular post-genre new book is proof." — Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus, Book of Numbers, and Witz “Shane Anderson’s ‘Joy’ is contagious." ––The Poetry Foundation “Compelling.”––Blake Butler