After the Oracle

by Shane Anderson

Overview

In 2016, Shane Anderson made a vow to live according to the four core values of the Golden State Warriors to escape a decade of defeats—including divorce, debilitating spinal surgery and a suicide attempt. The basketball team’s values of joy, mindfulness, compassion, and competition became Anderson’s guiding principles, providing him a lens to investigate a myriad of social, personal, philosophical, and political issues, such as homelessness, the promises and failures of rave culture, and the limits of self-help. Part memoir, part essay, and part chronicle of the greatest five-year stretch of a team in NBA history, After the Oracle depicts the makes and misses of one expat trying to make a life worth living.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781646051465
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	11/16/2021
Pages:	196
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Shane Anderson has written three books of poetry and experimental prose (Soft Passer, Études, and Melanic Ray Meditations), and translated several books from German, including Thomas Pletzinger’s The Great Nowitzki, Elke Erb’s A poem is what it does, and Ulf Stolterfoht’s The Amme Talks. Anderson’s writing and translations can be found in The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, Ugly Duckling Presse, and elsewhere. A native of Northern California, Anderson lives with his family in Berlin.

Table of Contents

Beginning, Again 11

On Three Very Bad Days That Would Turn into Three Very Bad Years and Beyond April 14-16, 2010

Joy 49

On Family, Homelessness, Luck, and the Greatness of Stephen Curry June 23, 2016

Beginning, Again 65

On Oracles and Self-Help

Mindfulness 69

On Work, Cigarettes, Preppers, and Being in the Zone with Klay Thompson November 13, 2017

Beginning, Again 109

On the Golden State Warriors and the Secret of Basketball July 2010-July 2019

Compassion 141

On Friendship, the Ghost Ship Fire, Rave Culture, and the Heated Draymond Green February 9, 2018

Beginning, Again 193

On Why Basketball Matters (with Kevin Durant), Holy Grounds, Aesthetics, and Spectatorship April 14, 2018

Competition 221

On Finding a Home and Learning from Others September 25, 2018

A New Hope 241

On the End of An Era, Off the Record with Andre Iguodala March 18-April 15, 2020

Editorial Reviews

09/20/2021

In this memorable debut, poet and sportswriter Shane shapes his favorite basketball team’s philosophies into a novel outlook on his own life. He relates how he went from being a “jobless recent divorcé” in 2010 who obsessively followed the Golden State Warriors and was in need of a major life overhaul to deciding to use the one constant in his world to begin living with purpose. He did so by adopting the four guiding mantras—“joy, mindfulness, compassion, and competition”—that Steve Kerr used to lead the Warriors to an NBA championship in 2015. Structured chronologically, Shane’s lyrical narrative links each mantra to events in his life, such as discovering joy in a promising new relationship, or reconnecting with his mother—whose experience with homelessness teaches him “joy is not a noun. It’s in the verb”—and having compassion for a stranger whose partner died in the 2016 Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland, Calif. In detailing his yearslong effort to improve his life and mental health, Anderson’s passionate fandom shines through as he parallels the Warriors’ victories and defeats alongside his own, making this a particularly enjoyable tale for anyone who has followed the team’s remarkable rise over the past decade. This evocative story deserves a wide audience. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"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

From the Publisher