The Answers

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 Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery. Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond.

The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history — the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities. In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.

faits divers are the various reports in a news bulletin, miscellaneous human interest stories, theorised by Roland Barthes as ‘total’ and ‘immanent’ information.

ferrara deux (faits divers) scrolls around the discovered corpse of a talented street musician named Landau, mangled and sealed into vacuum bags in the walk-in of a modern Italian-American restaurant. Street performance is content for an attention economy, playing on authenticities and profiting from recognition.

In this debut novel, artist Ivan Cheng reconfigures recent performance texts into an approximation of a murder mystery.

The story of a meeting between a woman and a man linked by music for one night, in a nuptial dance of bodies and words doomed to failure: an ode to desire by the Franco-Moroccan poetess.

Rim Battal (born 1987 in Casablanca, lives and works between Paris and Rabat since 2012) is a French artist and poet.

Edited by Yasmina Naji.
Translated into Arabic by Abdelilah Khattabi.

Raphaëlle Milone's first novel, a dive into the heart of desires, acclaimed by Simon Liberati as well as by Jean-Luc Nancy.

Raphaëlle Milone (born 1991 in Riom) is a French writer.

Oracles don’t require belief—they now theatrically suspend disbelief. No longer advisors of world policy, they run Locus Solus, a town that has come to ramble around an eponymous theatre and chocolate factories. Theo, a centuries-old vampire intent on remaining contemporary through performance, visits Locus Solus, which is hosting Praise Estate, an international theatre festival. He uses the festival as an opportunity to stay with Gean, his oracle boyfriend, who is there visiting family. Theo has a fetish for the future, fixated on the one thing he is in no shortage of.

Confidences / Oracle is a lover’s trip to a weeklong theatre festival. A vehicle for recontextualising recent performance scripts and texts, Oracle is the third instalment in Ivan Cheng’s Confidences series, which intertwines vampires and performance as sites for circulation and recognition.

A legend in his home country of Greece but virtually unknown abroad, The Commune is the final work of Marios Chakkas, composed in the months preceding his early death in 1972. Born under the Fascist regime and reared as a socialist revolutionary, The Commune is Chakkas' reckoning with the uncertainty of the past and the madness of the present as the military junta secures its position and the spirit of the socialist insurrection fades. Returning from political exile, Chakkas confronts the decay and ruin of his Athenian neighborhood as he recounts childhood gunfights in the streets, churches filled with asbestos, vanished comrades, and violent squabbles over memorials for executed partisans in his singular voice which swerves from scorching poetic indignation to gallows humor to metaphysical meditation.

Chloe Tsolakoglou is a Greek-American writer who grew up in Athens, Greece. A PhD Student in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, her work has been published in or is forthcoming by Denver Quarterly’s FIVES, The Adroit Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere.

Translated by Chloe Tsolakoglou