Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe audiobook

Ordinary Notes

By Christina Sharpe
Read by Christina Sharpe

Macmillan Audio
7.17 Hours • Unabridged
Format : Digital Download (In Stock)
  • 1 Format: Digital Download
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    ISBN: 9781250327239

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 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 existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages, 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.

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Summary

Summary

Among longlisted titles for National Book Awards - Longlist, 2023

Among longlisted titles for Barnes and Noble Best New Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for NPR Best Book of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for National Book Awards - Longlist, 2023

Among longlisted titles for Barnes and Noble Best New Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for National Book Awards - Longlist, 2023

Among longlisted titles for NPR Best Book of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for New Yorker Best Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for National Book Awards - Longlist, 2023

Among longlisted titles for Barnes and Noble Best New Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for The Atlantic Best Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for NPR Best Book of the Year, 2023

Among shortlisted titles for National Book Critics Circle Award - Nominee, 2023

Among longlisted titles for Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for New Yorker Best Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for National Book Awards - Longlist, 2023

Among longlisted titles for Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for NPR Best Book of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for National Book Awards - Longlist, 2023

Among longlisted titles for Barnes and Noble Best New Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for The Atlantic Best Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for NPR Best Book of the Year, 2023

Among shortlisted titles for National Book Critics Circle Award - Nominee, 2023

Among longlisted titles for Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for New Yorker Best Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for National Book Awards - Longlist, 2023

Among longlisted titles for Barnes and Noble Best New Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for The Atlantic Best Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for NPR Best Book of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for New Yorker Best Books of the Year, 2023

Among longlisted titles for New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year, 2023

A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice of the Week

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 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 existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages, 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.

Editorial Reviews

Editorial Reviews

“Assembles memories and insights, artifacts and artworks, balancing the persistence of racism and brutality with a rich variety of Black life. The book makes full use of its form, finding in fragmentation a way to eddy back and forth between cruelty and care, sorrow and joy.” —New York Times Book Review
"[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
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 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

Reviews

Reviews

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Author

Author Bio: Christina Sharpe

Author Bio: Christina Sharpe

Christina Sharpe is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being—named by the London Guardian as one of the best books of 2016—and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. She is the Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto.

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Details

Details

Available Formats : Digital Download
Category: Nonfiction/Social Science
Runtime: 7.17
Audience: Adult
Language: English

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