Binding: Hardcover
Description: 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 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.4 - color art throughout
Title: Ordinary Notes
Author(s): Sharpe Christina
Publisher: Farrar Straus And Giroux
Barcode: 9780374604486
Pages: 392 Pages
Language: English
Publication Date: 4/25/2023
Category: Black & Asian Studies