Ordinary Notes
Book description
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,…
Why read it?
2 authors picked Ordinary Notes as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
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.
“What is required of us, now? In this long time of our undoing?” Organized as a series of theoretical-poetic interventions, Ordinary Notes is one of those rare books that combines theory, memoir, and art.
There was something intensely meditative about Sharpe’s engagement with Black life in the context of racial capitalism, a beauty excavated beneath the spectacular and quotidian horror.
It is one of those rare books where political and social theory enters the realm of literature.
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