![]() ![]() This is a dark, feverish and weird tale that remains compelling throughout. Lou’s excruciating day will make readers cringe, and the recounting of his traumas is more than unsettling. Durkee tackles race and poverty, violence of many varieties, loss and longing, and the power of the imagination. There is humor here - from Lou’s driving advice, to his appreciation of the late comedian Bill Hicks, to his searing observations of self and passenger - but the novel is also deadly serious. Readers will easily find many metaphoric interpretations in the physicality of Lou’s driving, but Durkee is not really heavy-handed with them. Each chapter is almost a distinct vignette, some better than others, but the book is cohesive and tied together well. THE LAST TAXI DRIVER is not a long novel and speeds along at a brisk pace. ![]() In Lou, Durkee has created a fascinatingly complex character. Even as he is an eyewitness to their crimes and mistakes, worth and humanity, he often fails to see the same in himself. But their terrible habits, sorrows and loneliness, cruelties and frailties are his as well. Lou beholds his fares at what he believes to be a distance. ![]() Steering the taxi through a hectic and dangerous day, his delirium and anxiety increase as he is overcome with memories, regrets, rage and exhaustion. Readers, like Lou, only get glimpses of most of these people, though their presence lingers - in the taxi and in the story. Lou’s passengers are diverse but united in their desperation: an old woman going for dialysis, a rich alcoholic who urinates in the car but tips $100, a wife hiding from her husband being aided by her mother-in-law, a man just released from prison with nowhere to go. This is a dark, feverish and weird tale that remains compelling throughout." "Lou’s excruciating day will make readers cringe, and the recounting of his traumas is more than unsettling. As he drives, arguing with Stella, the owner of All Saints Taxi, and Horace, the spiteful dispatcher, Lou judges the people in his car and tries to show what he believes to be fair kindnesses, contemplates his troubled past, ponders his future, takes what he hopes is an Adderall that fell on the floor of his taxi, and drinks at least five Red Bulls. In the single day that this novel spans, Lou shuttles the elderly, the addicted, the infirm, the drunk, the strange and even the dying in a dilapidated Town Car to and from the trailer parks, seedy motels, hospitals and convenience stores of northern Mississippi. Yet the story of Lou, a taxi driver of rapidly disintegrating mental and physical health, has moments of the sublime as he chases ideas about Shakespeare, Buddhist enlightenment, and the light-filled possibility of alien abduction. The potential for violence lurks on every page and erupts in assaults sadly mundane and shockingly horrific. Also starring Deborah Twiss, Emily Jackson and Vincent Ticali, The Last Taxi Driver was written, directed, executive produced and cast by Debra Markowitz. Lee Durkee’s novel, THE LAST TAXI DRIVER, shares with the above a perspective on American life that is both realistic and paranoid and a frantic energy that emanates from its protagonist. Robert Clohessy (Blue Bloods) is The Last Taxi Driver. Equal parts Bukowski and Portis, Durkee's darkly comic novel is a feverish, hilarious, and gritty look at a forgotten America and a man at life's crossroads.The dark despair of driving in urban circles has been well-captured on film: think Taxi Driver and Repo Man. Shedding nuts and bolts, The Last Taxi Driver careens through highways and back roads, from Mississippi to Memphis, as Lou becomes increasingly somnambulant and his fares increasingly eccentric. Lou is forced to decide how much he can take as a driver, and whether keeping his job is worth madness and heartbreak. With Uber moving into town and his way of life vanishing, his girlfriend moving out, and his archenemy dispatcher suddenly returning to town on the lam, Lou must finish his bedlam shift by aiding and abetting the host of criminal misfits haunting the back seat of his disintegrating Town Car. Meet Lou-a lapsed novelist, struggling Buddhist, and UFO fan-who drives for a ramshackle taxi company that operates on the outskirts of a north Mississippi college town. Hailed by George Saunders as "a true original-a wise and wildly talented writer," Lee Durkee takes readers on a high-stakes cab ride through an unforgettable shift. "A wild, funny, poetic fever dream that will change the way you think about America." -George Saunders
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