Black Flies

by Shannon Burke

Book Overview

A "raw and fascinating" novel based on the author's experiences as a New York City paramedic during the crack epidemic--"Burke is a poet of trauma" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Black Flies is the story of paramedic Ollie Cross and his first year on the job in mid-'90s Harlem. It is a ground's eye view of life on the streets: the shootouts, the bad cops, the hopeless patients, the dark humor in bizarre circumstances,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1593761910
• ISBN13: 9781593761912
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: Soft Skull
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Compelling and Well Written

I don't ususally choose books with such graphic violence but this is a hard topic presented in a soft way. I couldn't put it down. The writing is simple and satisfying and maintains a steady tempo throughout. But it is a dark subject and not for the faint of heart. I'll read every book Shannon Burke writes.

This book is terrific

This book is a terrific read. I couldn't put it down. It's dark and comic and a coming of age story. But most of all it is masterly written book allowing the reader to venture into a forbidding world with compassion and insight.

amazing

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

Gritty Emergency Medicine In NYC

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.

a dark, riveting, and sure-handed second effort

. . .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 . . .