About The Yazoo Blues

Junior Ray Loveblood, one of the most outrageous and original personalities to appear in American literature in many years, returns in John Pritchard's The Yazoo Blues.

Loveblood relates dual stories, both that of a soldier slowly driven mad by the haunting countryside, and of Loveblood’s friend Mad Owens, whose search for existential love meets its greatest challenge in the arms of the stripper Money Scatters. Loveblood’s conclusions are hilarious, absurd, and at times intensely revealing. Equally profane and profound, the fictional narrator of Pritchard’s novel illuminates the complex stew of evolving race relations, failed economies, and corrupt politics that define much of the post-civil rights rural Deep South.

Now Available!

The Yazoo Blues (Trade Cloth, 256 pages, $24.95) is now available from NewSouth Books or your favorite local or online book retailer.
ISBN 978-1-58838-217-7.

Don't miss John Pritchard's first novel, Junior Ray, now available in paperback!

About John Pritchard

Barnes and Noble named John Pritchard's first book, Junior Ray, a Top Ten Sensational Debut Novel for 2005. Pritchard grew up in the Mississippi Delta; he currently lives in Memphis, where he has taught college-level English for thirty-two years. He is working on the third book in the Junior Ray trilogy.

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Web Extras

• Watch John Pritchard talk about The Yazoo Blues and writing on YouTube.

• Read an excerpt of The Yazoo Blues.

• John Pritchard Q&A interview with TurnRow Books.

• The Yazoo Blues reviewed in the Tunica Times.

Praise for
The Yazoo Blues

Publishers Weekly

Starred review. “In this insightful, laugh-out-loud follow-up to his debut novella, Junior Ray, Pritchard again indulges the profanely backwoods, occasionally backwards, voice of Mississippi ‘good ol' boy’ Junior Ray Loveblood. Between expletives and misanthropic digressions, Junior Ray reveals a lifetime of deep, unlikely friendships, even getting at an occasional truth in a humble manner that's—as Junior Ray might put it—‘as soft as a quail's fart.’”

Corey Mesler, author

“This is what Twain would write if he were alive today and if he had Pritchard's vision of a Delta rich in history and anti-history. I can’t say enough how much I enjoyed myself. Yazoo Blues is one long pitch-perfect, profane prose poem. And that’s only the P’s.”

James C. Cobb, author

“In the sometimes profanely profound but always profoundly profane Junior Ray Loveblood, John Pritchard has given the Delta the kind of thorough and insightful historian it has needed for so long. If this book doesn't make you laugh a lot and maybe think at least a little, I'm guessing you're not from around here.”

William Gay, author

“Darkly comic, profound and original, The Yazoo Blues stakes out Pritchard's territory on the rough side of Southern Literature.”