Yellow Jack A Novel

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