The Celestial Jukebox: A Novel

"I love teaching this book because it says so many things about Southern place and space. And it privileges the narrative of the outsider. One character, Boubacar, who came from Somalia, is learning to navigate the Delta. The jukebox which the title refers to lives in a small town grocery store owned by a Chinese immigrant, like a great many that once existed in the Delta. Shearer tells the story of newcomers to this small town and shows how the Delta looks through fresh eyes. I really admire Celestial Jukebox as a work of literature. First, Faulkner probably never said it. In My Mississippi , the writer Willie Morris assigned those words to Faulkner because, he said, he felt it was something that Faulkner should’ve said. Willie was on to something; that’s a lot of what Faulkner’s work is about. There is so much in Mississippi, which Faulkner mined for his fiction, that can explain this country. It’s time that we stop thinking of Faulkner as a Southern writer or a Mississippi writer and start thinking of him as an American writer or an international writer. By getting readers to understand the complexities of a place like Mississippi, Faulkner helps us understand a lot about the rest of the world."