Ordinary Notes
A finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction

A 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 Noble

The 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—together 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, and 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.

Color art throughout

1141344290
Ordinary Notes
A finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction

A 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 Noble

The 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—together 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, and 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.

Color art throughout

35.0 In Stock
Ordinary Notes

Ordinary Notes

by Christina Sharpe
Ordinary Notes

Ordinary Notes

by Christina Sharpe

Hardcover

$35.00 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Qualifies for Free Shipping
  • PICK UP IN STORE

    Your local store may have stock of this item.

Related collections and offers


Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A compassionate, bold and poetic memoir told in an unfolding of notes-to-self, this book navigates race, resistance, identity, creativity, love and family. Evocative, kaleidoscopic and crisply, concretely real, Ordinary Notes has a palpable music in its play of memory and juxtaposition. This unique, exquisite book should be read again and again… and again.

A finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction

A 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 Noble

The 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—together 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, and 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.

Color art throughout


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780374604486
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date: 04/25/2023
Pages: 392
Sales rank: 318,199
Product dimensions: 6.60(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Christina Sharpe is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being—named by the Guardian as one of the best books of 2016—and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. She is currently Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Department of Humanities, at York University, in Toronto.
From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews