Ordinary Notes

By: Christina Sharpe

Narrated by: Christina Sharpe

Long-listed, National Book Awards 2023

Long-listed, Barnes and Noble Best New Books of the Year, 2023

Long-listed, The Atlantic Best Books of the Year, 2023

Long-listed, Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, 2023

L.A. Times Book Prize—Finalist, 2023

Long-listed, NPR Best Book of the Year, 2023

National Book Critics Circle Award—Nominee, 2023

Long-listed, Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year, 2023

Long-listed, New Yorker Best Books of the Year, 2023

Long-listed, New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year, 2023

This program is read by the author.

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 hear 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 this book, 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 Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

©2023 Christina Sharpe (P)2023 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"[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)

“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

Very good…

Not exactly what I expected but exactly what I needed. Dr. Sharpe expanded my reading list and I’m +1 intellectually because of her…

Fantastic exploration of the many paths of black life

This was my first time sitting with Christina Sharpe’s writing and I was absolutely floored. I felt seen. It was like I was being spoken to each morning I listened by someone who cared deeply about me and my pain. Both explaining what I already knew of my life, as well as what is to come and what was before me. Ordinary notes, breaking down the systemic brutality that is so present in my body every moment in both sleep, waking, and in death. A skill to travel through such brutality…examine one’s own life…and still leave hope for the (Black) readers to have hope anew.