WINNER OF THE 2023 HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
A dazzlingly inventive, deeply moving, intellectually bracing exploration of pain and beauty, private memory and public monument, art and complexity in contemporary Black life.

“I wanted to write about silences and terror and acts that hover over generations, over centuries. I began by writing about my mother and grandmother.” —from “Note 18” in Ordinary Notes

A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores with immense care profound questions about loss, and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 brief and urgent 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-day realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. Through the striking images and words in these pages, themes and tones echo: sometimes about life, art, language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, photography, and literature—but always attending, 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 and other gifts and ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to become present on the page. She articulates and follows an aesthetic of "beauty as a method,” collects entries from a community of thinkers towards a “Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness,” and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.

Christina Sharpe's profile page

• Short-listed, L.A. Times Book Prize
• Short-listed, National Book Critics Circle Awards
• Short-listed, James Tait Black Memorial Prize
• Short-listed, National Book Award
• Winner, Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize

CHRISTINA SHARPE is a writer, Professor, and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is also a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC), at the University of Johannesburg and a Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at the Arizona State University. She is the author of: In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016)—named by the Guardian and The Walrus as one of the best books of 2016 and a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award—and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke University Press, 2010).

WINNER OF THE 2023 HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS' CIRCLE AWARD IN NONFICTION
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOKS OF 2023
ONE OF THE NEW YORKER'S BEST BOOKS OF 2023
ONE OF VULTURE'S BEST BOOKS OF 2023
ONE OF THE ATLANTIC
ONE OF KIRKUS REVIEWS'S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF 2023
ONE OF PUBLISHERS WEEKLY'S TOP TEN BOOKS OF 2023
ONE OF BARNES AND NOBLE'S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF 2023
ONE OF THE CBC'S BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF 2023
ONE OF GRANTA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2023

“A deft blend of memoir, theory, archival documents and lyrical reflections. . . . [Ordinary Notes] build[s] into a mosaic that holds the relentless terror of Black life as well as its undeniable beauty. . . . By turning her gaze inward, Sharpe offers a framework for understanding how to move forward, even when burdened by all the knowledge of the world’s cruelty. . . . [Sharpe’s] most liberating and poetic experiment yet.” —The New York Times

“[Ordinary Notes] paints a multidimensional picture of Blackness in America. . . . With distinct lyricism and a firm but tender tone, Sharpe executes every element of this book flawlessly. Most impressive is the collagelike structure, which seamlessly moves between an extraordinary variety of forms and topics. . . . It is a testament to Sharpe’s artistry that this incredibly complex text flows so naturally. . . . An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“[A] poignant and genre-defying triumph. . . . [Ordinary Notes is] 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)
"Historically attuned, riddled with moments of tenderness and brimming with righteous anger.” —The New York Times
“A genre-defying, impressionistic series of meditations on history, identity, and the way we live now.” —Toronto Star
“Readers are invited to witness the ordinary joys and sorrows of Black lives and how they are transformed within the everyday reality of systems of racial supremacy. . . . To read this book is to turn toward a voice and listen as if our lives depend on it — and risk being changed in the process.” —2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction judges

“[Ordinary Notes] is poetry, it is criticism, it is record. . . . [A] new literary form. . . . Language here acts upon itself as a form of kinship . . . [in] a mosaic of Black thought that refuses the unlivability of our current world.” —CBC Books
“A testament to Black resistance. . . . [Ordinary Notes] finds formal revolution . . . in the juxtaposition of . . . the narrative and the poetic and the academic. . . . It is . . . all of these things at once, and yet somehow more than the sum of its already high-quality parts.” —Newcity Lit
“[Ordinary Notes] offer[s] lessons in attentiveness. . . . Sharpe asks us to become better readers, motivated not by extraction and violence, but by regard and tenderness. . . . Ordinary Notes is a big book full of small gestures . . . collected for the reader like a handful of gems.” —The Yale Review
“To read [Ordinary Notes] . . . is to enter into a kind of willed seduction. Sharpe’s delicate facility with language, tone, and rhythm, and her ability to articulate the achingly inarticulable are . . . irresistible. Delivered in sparse, lyrical sentences that hold both the sublime and the harrowing in taut balance, the author’s gifts of insight and analysis have few peers in recent writing. . . . [Ordinary Notes] mines difficult terrain, to unearth and conjure language that signifies how—despite daunting and life-altering realities—Black people insist on living meaningful, loving, generative, and beautiful lives. . . . [A] singular achievement.” —Quill & Quire (starred review)
“Masterful. . . . Christina Sharpe's experimental visual poetic work Ordinary Notes is a profound rumination on knowledge, loss, Black American life and memory.” —The Skinny
“Ordinary Notes is like an intellectual ice climb—you move along a careful series of handholds to cross a terrain that might otherwise seem impassable, and afterward, you are amazed at the passage. At once an act of careful attention and a juxtaposition of observations and questions, the result is a powerful vision of American life, drawn from the Black intellectual history and aesthetics that Sharpe has cultivated as the means to her own liberation, so that she might offer it to others.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write An Autobiographical Novel

“Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangements and the violence of antiblackness and yet always finds a way to beauty and possibility. With exacting detail, she conveys the heartbreak of the imposed order and the openings that reside in the ordinary and offers a method, a poetics for refusing and exceeding the given, for sustaining life, for breaking the colonial frame, and imagining what might emerge at the end of the known world. Ordinary Notes is an exquisite text. It demands everything of the reader and, in turn, offers us a vocabulary for living.” —Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
“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. 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
“A long regard, a movement along the possibilities, and the stillness, at the heart of thinking. In these pages, we experience continuities but not endings, and every person is asked to face their present, and to see and feel and think without innocence. Ordinary Notes will forever alter each reader who grapples with its disquiet and its beauty.” —Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing