This is a gorgeous book that offers 248 interconnected notes or meditations on Black life in America, ranging from Sharpe's visits to the National Lynching Memorial to annotations of her mother's Black literature library. So much care has been taken in how Sharpe writes about both histories and presents of violence and joy that is found in Black identity, family, and community. I wanted to both read this all at once and pause on one note for hours.
A finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction
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…
This is a lyrical and atmospheric novel that traces a society and family breaking down in the face of authoritarian government and civil war. I felt an enormous weight on me as it inevitably moved towards further tragedy in its latter half. Although set in Ireland, reading this poignant novel in 2024 most clearly resonates with the ongoing horrific violence against Palestinians.
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023 • NATIONAL BESTSELLER
"A prophetic masterpiece." — Ron Charles, Washington Post
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police on her step. They have arrived to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.
Ireland is falling apart, caught in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny. As the life she knows and the ones she loves disappear before her eyes, Eilish must contend with the dystopian logic of her new, unraveling country. How far will she…
I came to this after reading Hamid's most recent magical realist work on racial transformation, 'The Last White Man'. In 'Exit West', Hamid reimagines the the migrant crisis, creating magical doors where Global South refugees can teleport to the West. Hamid writes beautifully through extremely long sentences that create an all-encompassing sense of his characters' subjectivity and perspectives.
In Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction, Hannah Lauren Murray shows that early US authors repeatedly imagined lost, challenged and negated white citizenship in the new nation. Reading canonical and lesser-known writers including Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, Murray argues that white characters on the borders of life and death were liminal presences that disturbed prescriptions of racial belonging in the early US. Fears of losing whiteness were routinely channelled through the language of liminality, in a precursor to today’s white anxieties of marginalisation and minoritisation.
