Bringing out the Dead (Signed First Edition)

Connelly, Joe

ISBN 10: 0375400400 / ISBN 13: 9780375400407

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1998

About this Item

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. First edition, first printing, with full number line including the 1. Hardcover. Quarter black cloth over red paper-covered boards with silver spine lettering. Very Fine in a very fine dust jacket. Publisher s original price intact on jacket flap ($23.00). Comes with archival-quality mylar dust jacket protector. A tight clean copy. Octavo, 272 pages. A novel based on the author s experience as a New York City paramedic, following a burnt-out EMT haunted by the lives he could not save. This was Connelly s debut novel. It was adapted into a 1999 film directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Nicolas Cage. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page--the author's name only, without any other writing. Purchased new and opened only for author signature. You cannot find a better copy.

Seller Inventory # signed-fiction-642

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Bringing out the Dead (Signed First Edition)
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375400400
• ISBN 13: 9780375400407
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: New
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

Perhaps only someone who has worked for almost a decade as a medic in New York City's Hell's Kitchen--as Joe Connelly has--could write a novel as riveting and fiercely authentic as Bringing Out the Dead. Like a front-line reporter, Connelly writes from deep within the experience, and the result is a debut novel of extraordinary power and intensity.

In Frank Pierce, a brash EMS medic working the streets of Hell's Kitchen, Connelly gives us a man who is being destroyed by the act of saving people. Addicted to the thrill ("the best drug in the world") and the mission of the job, Frank is nevertheless drowning in five years' worth of grief and guilt--his own and others': "my primary role was less about saving lives than about bearing witness." His wife has left him, he's drinking on the job, and just a month ago he "helped to kill" an eighteen-year-old asthmatic girl. Now she's become the waking nightmare of all his failures: hallucination and projection ("the ghosts that once visited my dreams had followed me out to the street and were now talking back"), and as real to him as his own skin. And in reaction to her death, Frank has desperately resurrected a patient back into a life now little better than death.

In a narrative that moves with the furious energy of an ambulance run, we follow Frank through two days and nights: into the excitement and dread of the calls; the mad humor that keeps the medics afloat; the memories, distant and recent, through which Frank reminds himself why he became a medic and tries, in vain, to convince himself to give it up. And we are with him as he faces his newest ghost: the resurrected patient, whose demands to be released into death might be the most sensible thing Frank has heard in months, if only he would listen.

Bringing Out the Dead is a stunning novel.

About the Author

Joe Connelly worked for nine years as a medic for St. Clare's Hospital in New York City, where he was born. He lives in New York City and is at work on his second novel.