"[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 Scene
