But how likely are you to lend a hand when you have developed “a type of Tourette’s, unique to hackies.” It’s called a “yellow mind.” It’s a malady in which cabbies “drive around autocorrecting the world with a cuss-filled stream of consciousness. Lou has a core desire to do what’s right. What he’s good at is seeing individual citizens of the earth-all the warts, the weirdness, the struggles. What Lou wants is a big telescope to peer deep into space from the darkest spot on the planet. The Last Taxi Driver is a stream of attitude. Stella’s drivers, Lou tells us, “work at least sixty-hour weeks and don’t have bank accounts or health insurance, they’ve never taken a vacation, and many of them don’t have but three or four teeth in their skulls.” Occasionally, Lou picks up fares at the Rebel Motel, “famous for murders and suicides but also for hosting art hops in which local painters appropriate the cell-like rooms to display their still lives to hipsters.” (The name “Rebel” is pronounced like a verb to create a rhyme with “Motel.”) We are the poor man’s ambulance, and we are also, sad to say, the poor man priest, our cab the confessional in which the people litmus-test their wildest fears and prejudices.” We deliver rich people cigarettes and serve as care managers for the elderly-I’ve done everything from helping old people peeto taking out their garbage to chasing after their escaped pets. We spring upstanding citizens from bail bondsman offices and squirrel them across town to the impoundment lot behind the Toyota dealership. We cart the halt and lame to Kroger and lug their groceries up flights of stairs for dollar tips. While the night crew hauls around scrums of Adderall-vomiting co-eds and makes twice the Jack we do, the day shift takes citizens to work, mostly black people in the service industry. “Stella likes to say that day shift cabbies are the fabric that holds the town together, that we’re as important as any utility, and sometimes I think I think she’s right. Lou has started reading Miko’s books about Buddhism “in an attempt to stop myself from flipping everybody off. Lou tries to observe the deer “without attraction or aversion, like the Buddha advised, to somehow absorb her dignity without fixating on the ugliness of her stump or the direness of her fate.” His girlfriend is a depressed ex-poet named Miko who is “entitled to a certain amount of ennui.” Lou is a novelist, but he’s gone “cold on the page.” A three-legged doe hangs around his backyard ravine. He keeps handy “a fat bottle of Ozium and a thin bottle of Aloha Febreze.” He’s into UFO’s. “A horn, like an active sex drive, can get you shot or blackjacked or cold-cocked or rear-ended.” “And in some ways she’s right,” thinks Lou. He’s complained to Stella about it, but she informed him that good drivers don’t need one. He drives for a company called All Saints owned by a woman named Stella. Or destiny.Īnd no taxi driver is in a better spot to ponder the fairness of life than Lou Bishoff, who drives in the fictional town of Gentry, Mississippi. A taxi driver never knows his or her next destination. That next dispatch, the next fare, the next detour. 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.Nobody lives on the knife-edge of fate like a taxi driver. 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 You Can Do It!: Motivation and Self-Help Audiobooks.LGBTQIA Audiobooks Memoirs & Biographies.Presto-DIGI-cation! (it's the New Stay-cation). Nature Books for Hibernators, or Feeling Outside When the Weather Keeps You Inside.NaNoWriMo Inspo: November is National Novel Writing Month!.Creepies and Creatures and Weirdness, oh my!.
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