Research Catalog

Yellow jack

Title
Yellow jack / Josh Russell.
Author
Russell, Josh.
Publication
New York : W.W. Norton, [1999], ©1999.

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StatusFormatAccessCall NumberItem Location
TextRequest in advance PS3568.U76677 Y4 1999Off-site

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Details

Description
250 pages; 22 cm
Summary
  • "Yellow Jack is a ribald, picaresque trip through an 1840s New Orleans saturated with sex, drugs, death, and corruption. It is the story of Claude Marchand, an apprentice to Louis Daguerre, who discovers the magic art of photography when he hides a broken thermometer in a cabinet and finds that the mercury fumes bring out images etched by the sun in metal plates.
  • After a falling-out with Daguerre, Marchand flees from Paris to New Orleans where he becomes the first daguerreotypist in America and he gets hopelessly entangled with both a voodoo-adept octoroon mistress and the erotically precocious daughter of a prominent New Orleans family. As the city is ravaged each summer by yellow fever (yellow jack), Marchand's miraculous art is tested by death, politics, and jealousy.
  • Mercury drives him mad, but his work will nevertheless make him immortal, after a fashion."--BOOK JACKET.
ISBN
0393047687
LCCN
99021657
OCLC
ocm40869800
Owning Institutions
Columbia University Libraries