Yellow Jack

By Josh Russell

Book Overview

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

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 039332110X
• ISBN13: 9780393321104
• Release Date: September 2000
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 258 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Enjoyable

I enjoyed this first novel from the author, and got a second copy as a gift for my girlfriend, who also thought it was very well written. I think most people will come away from this read very satisfied. Thanks

Finally . . . a novel that delivers.

Russell's Yellow Jack is a wonderfully compact and creative novel. The book contains all the things readers look for: conflict, interesting langauge, unique characters, and superb dialogue. Without a doubt, one of the best novels I've read in the last decade (and I read a lot).

Great read

I don't understand why someone, after reading the dust jacket, would think that this novel is "socially redeeming"! My goodness! Is Anne Rice "socially redeeming"? Norman Vincent Peale this ain't! What it is, is lusty, dark, sensual and well written. I'd highly recommend it.

unusual and interesting

Yellow Jack is an impertinent jig before the horrified eyes of readers of dreary "domestic" and "historical" realism. Russell's sensibility is not tainted by our literary legacy of East Coast Puritan aesthetics. Wonderfully refreshing!

Brilliant.

This book is flat-out excellent. The writing is beautiful without overwhelming the strange, strange story; the "historical" aspect is handled deftly, without the trappings of 90s politics--the reader is never led, and this one certainly didn't have to be. This is literature. People should be carrying Josh Russell around on their shoulders. It's twisted and true, it's hot and bothered. Read it.