The Last Taxi Driver (Thorndike Press Large Print Basic)

Review
The Last Taxi Driver is unpredictable, emotionally moving, and laugh-out-loud funny. Lee Durkee writes with honesty and deep insight. This book is filled with compassion. I loved it. The best book I've read in years.--Chris Offutt, author of Country Dark
The Last Taxi Driver is unpredictable, emotionally moving, and laugh-out-loud funny. Lee Durkee writes with honesty and deep insight. This book is filled with compassion. I loved it. The best book I've read in years.--Chris Offutt, author of Country Dark
By turns hilarious, angry and sweet, once again Durkee perfectly captures the mood of our time.--Square Books
A wild, funny, poetic fever-dream that will change the way you think about America. Durkee is a true original--a wise and wildly talented writer who knows something profound about that special strain of American darkness that comes out of blended paucity, materialism, and addiction--but also, in the joy and honesty and wit of the prose, he offers a way out. I loved this book and felt jangled and inspired and changed by it.--George Saunders
This book's a blast! A super-long shift in the life of a north Mississippi taxi driver makes for hilarious moments as well as lyrical ones. Durkee's Mississippi is entirely his own as he parades a line of passengers that are as colorful, sad, and strange as any in literature. A terrific novel by a terrific writer!--Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked, Letter
Written by a former cabbie, The Last Taxi Driver is a darkly comic novel about a middle-aged hackie's daylong descent into madness, heartbreak, and murder. Lou--a lapsed novelist and UFO aficionado--drives 70-hour weeks for a ramshackle taxi company that operates on the outskirts of a north Mississippi college town among the trailer parks and housing projects. With Uber moving into town and his way of life fast vanishing, his girlfriend moving out on him, and his archenemy-dispatcher suddenly returning to the state on the lam, Lou must keep driving his way through a bedlam shift even when that means aiding and abetting the host of criminal misfits haunting the back seat of his Town Car. Shedding nuts and bolts at every turn, The Last Taxi Driver careens through the highways and back roads, from Mississippi to Memphis and back, as Lou becomes increasingly somnambulant and his fares increasingly eccentric. Equal parts Bukowski and Portis, Durkee's novel is an homage to a dying American industry.