{"product_id":"the-celestial-jukebox-9780820328386","title":"The Celestial Jukebox","description":"\u003cp\u003eSet in the invented Mississippi Delta town of Madagascar, Cynthia Shearer's \u003ci\u003eThe Celestial Jukebox\u003c\/i\u003e depicts a rural South dependent on agribusiness and the fruits of some less attractive forms of capitalism--gambling and other vices. Into this world comes Boubacar, a fifteen-year-old African boy joining friends from Mauritania already living in the area. They are new African blacks not especially noteworthy in a town filled with Chinese emigrants, African Americans within memory of slavery, and straggling members of the original white families of the area. Presiding over Madagascar is Angus, the second-generation Delta Chinese proprietor of the Celestial Grocery, and his vintage jukebox with its treasure of Slim Harpo, Sam Cooke, and Wanda Jackson songs. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe ties that bind the lives in this community together are American roots music and the desire to make a home in the rural South. The purity and beauty of Cynthia Shearer's writing--like the purity of music that exists within this story, an imagined soundtrack of more than thirty songs--marks \u003ci\u003eThe Celestial Jukebox\u003c\/i\u003e as that most rare book, a novel as historically expansive as it is intimate, filled with music, wisdom, and spontaneous joy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCynthia Shearer is the former curator of Rowan Oak, the home of William Faulkner, and holds a M.A. in English from the University of Mississippi. She has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her first novel, \"The Wonder Book of the Air,\" received the 1996 prize for fiction from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"University of Georgia Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50328905416978,"sku":"9780820328386","price":20.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_48533664-b4ed-4562-99e9-bf7720f9c68a.jpg?v=1727754363","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/the-celestial-jukebox-9780820328386","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}