About this item
Finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Awards in Nonfiction. Finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. Winner of the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Named a Best Book of 2023 by The New York Times, NPR, New York Magazine, Kirkus, the New Yorker, Granta, The Atlantic, Publishers Weekly, and Barnes and Noble.. Critically 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 authors mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. "I learned to see in my mothers house," writes Sharpe. "I learned how not to see in my mothers 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
About the Author
Christina Sharpe is Professor of Humanities at York University. She is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke 2010) and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke 2016) .
