Yellow Jack
A Novel
Published on 2. May 2011
256 pages
978-0-393-34185-0 (ISBN)
Description
"[An] erotic, disturbing novel . . . shimmers with intensity . . . irresistible."—New Orleans Times-Picayune
Hailed by reviewers as "an electrifying debut" (Baltimore Sun) and "perhaps the best evocation of New Orleans ever to appear in print" (Richmond Times-Dispatch), Yellow Jack has given Southern literature its own intoxicating hybrid of Caleb Carr, Flannery O'Connor, and Vladimir Nabokov. Russell's "virtuoso storytelling, evocative prose and original conception mark [his first book] as a significant work that we can only hope will be followed by many more" (Chicago Tribune). Yellow Jack is a ribald, picaresque trip through an 1840s New Orleans saturated with sex, drugs, death, and corruption. In this "luminously haunting" (Entertainment Weekly) portrait of decadence, daguerrotypist Claude Marchand becomes hopelessly entangled with both a voodoo-adept octoroon mistress and the erotically precocious daughter of a prominent New Orleans family. "Russell has distilled the New Orleans of the mid-1800s, the terrible fever of the title, and the savage lives of the characters into a novel of terrible beauty."—Nashville SceneMore details
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Person
Josh Russell is professor of English at Georgia State University and co-director of the Creative Writing Program. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Prose, he is the author of three novels.
