Dazzling and original, "Sonata for Jukebox is a brilliant foray into how pop music has woven itself into our lives since the dawn of the recording age. Geoffrey O'Brien has delved into 20th-century pop music as we experience it: a phenomenon that is at once public and private; personal yet popular. This is not a history of pop music, although fragments of that history find their way into its pages. It is not a memoir, although it is an entertaining biography of the author's ears and his family's exceptional affinity with pop music--his father was a leading New York DJ and his grandfather led a dance band in Philadelphia. It is an exploration of what listeners hear, what they think they hear, and how they connect it with the rest of their lives. The dizzying array of musical references will play through the reader's mind like a soundtrack as O'Brien explores how lives are lived in the presence--and in the memory of the presence--of music.

Geoffrey O'Brien is a poet and prose writer. He has been honored with a Whiting Award and contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books, Artforum, Film Comment, and other journals. He is editor-in-chief of The Library of America and lives in New York City