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Published Apr 2023
392 pages
Genre: Essays
Publication Information
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―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.
"[A] poignant and genre-defying triumph...The fragmentary dispatches are rich with suggestion and insight, generating meaning through juxtaposition and benefiting from Sharpe's pointed prose. Moving and profound, this is not to be missed." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"With distinct lyricism and a firm but tender tone, Sharpe executes every element of this book flawlessly...It is a testament to Sharpe's artistry that this incredibly complex text flows so naturally. An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness." —Kirkus Review (starred review)
"A resonant collection of stories and reflections." —Library Journal
"Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes is an extraordinary gift to readers, gathering between its covers all manner of reading, as it explores, with formal daring and analytical aplomb, history, society, politics, and culture, particularly where and when they intersect with Black lives, including the writer's own. Among the many achievements here, these exemplary notes―which include a stirring recounting of the author's intellectual and aesthetic formation, and a tribute to motherly and familial love in the face of this country's and world's relentless brutalities―show how one might combine memoir, memorial, literary criticism, political and cultural critique, and theoretical accounting in order to imagine a new model, suffused with grace, subtlety, rigor, and care, for how to read and think with and against, which is to say, to produce true and lasting knowledge." —John Keene, author of Counternarratives
"Ordinary Notes is like an intellectual ice climb―you move along a careful series of handholds to cross a terrain that might otherwise seem impassable, and afterward, you are amazed at the passage. At once an act of careful attention and a juxtaposition of observations and questions, the result is a powerful vision of American life, drawn from the Black intellectual history and aesthetics that Sharpe has cultivated as the means to her own liberation, so that she might offer it to others." —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write An Autobiographical Novel
"Ordinary Notes is a long regard, a movement along the possibilities, and the stillness, at the heart of thinking. In these pages, we experience continuities but not endings, and every person is asked to face their present and to see and feel and think without innocence. Ordinary Notes will forever alter each reader who grapples with its disquiet and its beauty." —Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing
This information about Ordinary Notes was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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