#The last taxi driver
#The last taxi full

Transfixed, Ranjit sat through the rest of the movie, then bought another ticket and watched it again. As she waited, it began to rain, and she shrank back against the concrete, biting down into her lower lip. Unlike the other Bollywood actresses, with their ample bosoms and pale complexions, she was dark-skinned and slender, with vulnerable, doelike eyes. He'd entered in the middle of a film, a romance, apparently, because the heroine was waiting under a concrete overpass for her lover. He was still a cadet at the Military Academy in Chandigarh, and on one stifling hot Sunday he wandered into a cinema, bought a ticket, and sank down into a seat, enjoying the air-conditioning. The woman in the white dress is looking out of the window, lost in thought, biting down on her plump lower lip.ДЄ memory floods through him. The taxi is caught in the seething, rumbling flow of traffic and Ranjit feels an equivalent disturbance inside himself. After two long years of driving a cab here, the city's streets are burned into his brain. He nods in acknowledgment and pulls out onto lower Broadway, thinking of the quickest route: right onto Prince, swing over onto West Houston, cut through the Village on Sixth Avenue, and then a straight shot through Midtown to Central Park West. I know this woman, he thinks, then corrects himself. Her voice is low and modulated, but there are Indian undertones to it, as familiar as the voice of a long-forgotten lover. 'Seventy-second and Central Park West, please.' She piles three crisp white Prada shopping bags on the seat next to her, and they crinkle against her hip. Her crisp white dress reveals smooth brown shoulders, her face is obscured by large oval sunglasses, and her glossy black hair cascades to her shoulders. One long leg enters the cab, wearing a white wedge-heeled sandal, each toenail painted a perfect crimson. The crazies, of course, want to talk and talk.

#The last taxi full

Seasoned New Yorkers barely even notice Ranjit's red turban and full beard, but out-of-towners gape at him, reassured only by the hack license posted on the plexiglass partition. Ranjit watches the woman get into the cab, the same way he watches all his passengers, looking for signs of trouble. It clicks open and the cool air-conditioning leaks out, replaced by the smell of hot asphalt, sweat, and the faint, pungent odor of melting bubble gum. Horns blare and a bicycle messenger shouts Asshole! as he screeches to a stop.ДЄ bare brown arm reaches for the door handle. Ranjit Singh sees the woman in the white dress waving at him from the other side of Broadway and swerves his yellow cab across a lane of traffic. The place is a ghost town, thirteen thousand cabs desperately roaming the streets in search of a fare.

#The last taxi driver

The Last Taxi Driver is his first novel in twenty years.August in New York City. A former cab driver, he lives in North Mississippi.

In 2021 Scribner will publish his memoir Stalking Shakespeare, which chronicles his decade-long obsession with trying to find lost portraits of William Shakespeare. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper's Magazine, The Sun, Best of the Oxford American, Zoetrope: All Story, Tin House, New England Review, and Mississippi Noir. LEE DURKEE is the author of the novel Rides of the Midway (WW Norton). Equal parts Bukowski and Portis, Durkee's novel is an homage to a dying American industry. Written by a former cabbie, The Last Taxi Driver careens through the highways and backroads of North Mississippi as Lou becomes increasingly somnambulant and his fares increasingly eccentric. Against this backdrop, Lou has to keep driving, and driving-even if that means aiding and abetting the host of criminal misfits haunting the back seat of his Town Car. With LouвЂ™s way of life fast vanishing, an ex-dispatcher returns to town on the lam, triggering a bedlam shift which will test LouвЂ™s sanity and perhaps cost him his life.

Lou-a lapsed novelist and UFO enthusiast who has returned to his home state of Mississippi after decades away-drives for a ramshackle taxi company that operates on the outskirts of a college town among the trailer parks and housing projects. The Last Taxi Driver is a darkly comic novel about a day in the life of an exhausted, middle-aged hackie about to lose his job to Uber, his girlfriend to lethargy, and his ability to stand upright to chronic back spasms. Written by a former cabbie, The Last Taxi Driver is equal parts Bukowski and Portis, and an homage to a dying American industry.'A wild, funny, poetic fever-dream that will change the way you think about America.' -George Saunders