"[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
Author
I'm the author of three novels: A True History of the Captivation, Transport to Strange Lands, & Deliverance of Hannah Guttentag (Dzanc Books, 2012); Yellow Jack (W.W. Norton, 1999), which earned me the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Shane Stevens Fellowship in the Novel; and My Bright Midnight (LSU Press, 2010), which earned me a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Prose and won the Independent Publisher Book Awards bronze medal for Literary Fiction. My shorter prose has appeared in the Greying Ghost Press chapbook Pretend You'll Do It Again, and in several dozen magazines, textbooks, and anthologies, most recently Epoch, Copper Nickel, and Not Normal, Illinois.
