Ordinary Notes

Finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Awards in NonfictionFinalist for the National Book Award in NonfictionWinner of the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for NonfictionNamed a Best Book of 2023 by The New York Times, NPR, New York Magazine, Kirkus, the New Yorker, Granta, The Atlantic, Publisher's Weekly, 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―with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black e