Black Flies: A Novel (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: silver teeth, great medic, good medic, Mitch Green, Central Harlem, The Coroner (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Gunshot wounds, crack pipes and rotting corpses abound in this raw and fascinating novel about Harlem paramedics in the mid-1990s, the second novel from former EMT Burke. Oliver Cross graduated from Northwestern as a middle-class do-gooder. But he and his partner, Rutkovsky, a jaded Vietnam veteran and one of the city's best medics, see enough massive trauma to put Cross on the fast track to deep disillusionment. Of the bizarre, tragic and often shocking emergencies encountered during Cross's rookie tenure, the crisis comes when he and Rutkovsky respond to a call from an abandoned building where a crack-addicted, HIV-positive mother has just given birth to a premature baby, and their handling of the mother and child—believed to be stillborn—will alter the course of both men's lives. Burke is a poet of trauma, and his expert, macabre portrayal takes its toll on the reader just as the job takes its toll on Cross. (May)
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Review

"Burke's evocation of early 1990s New York is dead-on, as is the burnout and despair of paramedics who can't afford to understand or empathize with those they are tasked to treat. No wonder lines are crossed and consequences are enormous." -- Sarah Weinmann, "Picks of the Week"

"Gunshot wounds, crack pipes and rotting corpses abound in this raw and fascinating novel about Harlem paramedics in the mid-1990s, the second novel from former EMT Burke . . . Burke is a poet of trauma, and his expert, macabre portrayal takes its toll on the reader just as the job takes its toll on Cross." -- Publishers Weekly (starred)

"Although Black Flies is a novel, it contains more reflections of lived experience than some memoirs (particularly recent memoirs). Reading this arresting, confrontational book is like reading Dispatches, Michael Herr's indelible account of his years as a reporter in Vietnam." -- Liesl Schillinger, New York Times Book Review

"Burke's evocation of early 1990s New York is dead-on, as is the burnout and despair of paramedics who can't afford to understand or empathize with those they are tasked to treat. No wonder lines are crossed and consequences are enormous." --Sarah Weinmann, "Picks of the Week"

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press; 3rd edition (May 21, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593761910
• ISBN-13: 978-1593761912
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #115,279 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gritty Emergency Medicine In NYC, May 24, 2008

By	C. Hutton "book maven" (East Coast, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Mr. Burke has taken circumstances of his own life (as an EMT and as a paramedic) and turned them into this novel. It is fascinating but not for the faint-hearted -- it is graphic in a medical sort of way. "Black Flies" is a page-turner and the reader will finish this brief story in one night. Ollie Cross is a rookie inducted into the macho, burn out world of emergency medicine in an urban setting. I have the feeling that this is a memoir dressed up as a novel.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a dark, riveting, and sure-handed second effort, May 17, 2008

By	Jonathan E. Evison "Jonathan" (The Bathtub, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

. . .i lifted an advance readers copy of this book when i was in soft skull's chelsea offices, so i could read it on my flight back to seattle. . . i don't usually do "dark" all that much, i'm kind of a wuss that way-- i could scarcely make it through kosinski's 'the painted bird' because the graphic violence upset my sensitive constitution . . . but burke's novel entranced me from the get go-- in fact, i was rifling through the final pages even as we began to unload. i kept thinking: this is what scorsese was trying to achieve with "bringing in the dead"-- a riveting, wrenching, totally affecting moral tale. burke is masterful with tension, a narrative element which i find sadly lacking in far too much literary fiction . . .

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars amazing, June 16, 2008

By	H. L. Smith (Philadelphia, PA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

when I picked this book up for the first time I wasn't sure what to expect exactly, but I was taken by storm. I devoured this book in between calls on my ambulance and finished it in about 4 hours in total. it's got some stylistic similarities to Tim O'brien's the things they carried except that it holds together as a single more or less continuos story. at the same time the author has sort of a no holds barred concept which gives the story the same sort of gritty gut punching feeling as a Hubert Selby Jr Novel (Last exit to brooklyn, Requiem for a Dream)...almost all in all this book swept me away and didn't let me go until I was done and I spent the rest of the day leafing through it a reliving my favorite parts of the book because I wasnt quite ready to be done yet. highly recomended