Lost in the Game

“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

“With vivid language, analytical intelligence, and a richly affecting humanism, Thomas Beller deftly alternates between the high-wire, virtuoso professionals of the NBA and the thrills and humiliations shared among amateurs jostling each other on the playground. This radiant book is as much about city life and its requirement to partake in the adventure of being thrown in with strangers as it is about basketball. It is also about learning to embrace solitude, as the protagonist reverts again and again to playing hoops by himself or wandering the backrooms of sports arenas after everyone else has gone. All of which is to say that this is a book about learning how to live with one’s limitations and, beyond that, how to live.” - Phillip Lopate

“Anyone who played basketball for the Vassar Brewers hardly needs my endorsement, but this book is well-reported, fully felt, consistently observant, and held together by Thomas Beller’s love of the game.” - David Shields

“Lost in the Game is a beautiful book about playing and watching sports, and getting older, though you still feel like a kid. Its subject is basketball but its context is New York City, its playgrounds and the strange and various characters who battle there, a cross section of trash talkers and jump-shot artists, the sort who, though playground friends you can identify only by nickname, leave a lasting impression. A hymn to the greatest city and the style of street ball that’s been that city’s gift to the world sung by a 6-foot-5 Division III hoops star (size matters in basketball) who understands and heeds the code of the schoolyard—loser walks—and whose writing is as effective as James Harden’s step-back and as plush as Latrell Sprewell’s yacht. This is the best book I have ever read about what it’s like to play on after age, knees, position in life, and spouse have all told you to hang ‘em up.” - Rich Cohen

"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