Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe - PRE-ORDER

EXPECTED TO BE IN STOCK BY THE END OF MARCH

A singular achievement, Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes explores, with immense care, profound questions about loss, pain and beauty; private memory and public monument; art; complexity; and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 brief and urgent notes that cumulatively gather meaning, artifacts from the past – both public ones and the poignantly personal – are skilfully interwoven with present-day realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence.

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, a chorus of voices and experiences is summoned to the page. Sharpe 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.

‘Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes altered the way I understand much of the world around me.’ Sarah Moss, Guardian 

SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE 2024

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION 2023

WINNER OF THE HILARY WESTON WRITERS’ TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 2023

A NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE YEAR AND A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

Published April 2023
ISBN: 9781914198144
Format: Paperback