Ordinary Notes

A finalist for the National Book Award in NonfictionA finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award in Nonfiction Named a Best Book of 2023 by The New York Times, NPR, New York Magazine, Kirkus, and Barnes and NobleCritically acclaimed author of In the Wake, Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangements . . . and yet always finds a way to beauty and possibility (Saidiya Hartman). A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past--public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal--with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages--sometimes about language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, and literature--always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life. At the heart of Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the author's mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. I learned to see in my mother's house, writes Sharpe. I learned how not to see in my mother's house . . . My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words. Using these gifts and other ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to the page. She practices an aesthetic of beauty as a method, collects entries from a community of thinkers toward a Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness, and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a brilliant new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces. 4-color art throughout