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 "[Sharpe's] most liberating and poetic experiment yet. Made up of 248 individual notes, it is a deft blend of memoir, theory, archival documents and lyrical reflections on her daily life . . . The notes build in momentum and assemble themselves into a mosaic that holds the relentless terror of Black life as well as its undeniable beauty . . . If there’s an argument at the center of Ordinary Notes , it is that attentiveness and imagination are powerful restorative agents capable of reconstituting what has been broken down and targeted for obliteration." ― Jenna Wortham, The New York Times Magazine “ Ordinary Notes makes full use of its form, finding in fragmentation a way to propose and to elaborate, eddying back and forth between cruelty and care, sorrow and joy . . . [Sharpe] seeks to open up space for different futures, despite the undertow of the past . . . extraordinarily moving.” ― Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times "Both individually and in their totality, these entries exemplify what it looks like to care and be cared for, to mother, to be mothered and to mourn fiercely, and at all times to bear witness: to behold and be held by what beauty persists even within the enclosure of an anti-Black world." ― Victoria Adukwei Bulley, The Guardian "[The notes are] collected for the reader like a handful of gems―or, as Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha describes dandelions, 'jewels for everyday' and 'ordinary allurements' . . . Sharpe asks us to become better readers, motivated not by extraction and violence, but by regard and tenderness . . . This reading practice is key to what is perhaps the book’s most significant intervention: its form, which not only generatively extends Sharpe’s claims but also offers (and authorizes) new methods for doing scholarship. . . Sharpe converts the reader’s own modes of engagement, compelling us to zoom in as if on a poem, loop back as if circling a sculpture, slow down as if studying scripture . . . What a gift, what a composition of love for us." ― Elleza Kelley, The Yale Review "Sharpe casts her astute, critical gaze on monuments, exhibitions and other sites of historical memorialization, asking what they can tell us about the past, present and future of Black life and existence. Ordinary Notes touched me deeply. It is a book I will be referencing and recommending for years to come." ― Vanessa Peterson, Frieze "Extraordinary . . In this sui generis work, [Sharpe] devises a way to shape an articulate whole out of many parts: a document of the everyday nature of both antiblack racism and the 'Black notes'―ways of living, seeing and surviving―that disarrange it . . . The notes allow for a kaleidoscope of styles and tones; Sharpe moves between cultural criticism, literary inquiry, and memoir, with space to be detached, vulnerable, incisive, furious, intimate, confrontational, or abstract―as near or as far as she needs to be." ― Megin Jimenez, C hicago Review of Books "Christina Sharpe’s radical, profound new book . . . outlines new possibilities for reading, examining, interpreting, and being