Sep
24
7:00pm
William Boyle and Lee Durkee in conversation with Ed Needham
By CTTV
Join William Boyle and Lee Durkee in conversation with Ed Needham (Strong Words magazine) for the launch of their new books: City of Margins and The Last Taxi Driver
📷In City of Margins, the lives of several lost souls intersect in Southern Brooklyn in the early 1990s. There’s Donnie Parascandolo, a disgraced ex-cop with blood on his hands; Ava Bifulco, a widow whose daily work grind is her whole life; Nick, Ava’s son, a grubby high school teacher who dreams of a shortcut to success; Mikey Baldini, a college dropout who’s returned to the old neighborhood, purposeless and drifting; Donna Rotante, Donnie’s ex-wife, still reeling from the suicide of their teenage son; Mikey’s mother, Rosemarie, also a widow, who hopes Mikey won’t fall into the trap of strong arm work; and Antonina Divino, a high school girl with designs on breaking free from Brooklyn. Uniting them are the dead: Mikey’s old man, killed over a gambling debt, and Donnie and Donna’s poor son, Gabe.
These characters cross paths in unexpected ways, guided by coincidence and the pull of blood. There are new things to be found in the rubble of their lives, too. The promise of something different beyond the barriers that have been set out for them. This is a story of revenge and retribution, of facing down the ghosts of the past, of untold desires, of yearning and forgiveness and synchronicity, of the great distance of lives lived in dangerous proximity to each other. City of Margins is a Technicolor noir melodrama pieced together in broken glass.
'City of Margins is [William Boyle’s] best yet. With it, he proves himself the foremost chronicler of the crime melodrama. Emotional heft, intensity, humor. An Arthur Miller tale as directed by James Gray' - Megan Abbott, author of You Will Know Meand The Fever
📷William Boyle is from Brooklyn, New York. His books include: Gravesend, which was nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France and shortlisted for the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger in the UK; The Lonely Witness, which was nominated for the Hammett Prize and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière; A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself; and, most recently, City of Margins. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
📷The Last Taxi Driver is a darkly comic novel about a day in the life of Lou, an exhausted, middle-aged cabbie about to lose his job to Uber, his girlfriend to lethargy, and his ability to stand upright to chronic back spasms. 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. With Lou’s way of life fast vanishing, an ex-dispatcher resurfaces in town on the lam, triggering a bedlam shift which will test Lou’s sanity and perhaps cost him his life.
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.
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. Equal parts Bukowski and Portis, Durkee’s novel is an homage to a dying American industry.
“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, author of Lincoln in the Bardo
📷Lee Durkee is the author of the novels Rides of the Midway (WW Norton, 2000) and The Last Taxi Driver (No Exit Press 2020). His stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Sun, The Best of the Oxford American, Zoetrope: All Story, Tin House, & Mississippi Noir. In 2021 Scribner will publish Stalking Shakespeare, a memoir about Lee’s obsession with trying to find lost portraits of William Shakespeare. He lives in North Mississippi. The Last Taxi Driver is his first novel in twenty years.
📷Ed Needham is the editor and publisher of Strong Words magazine, a literary journal that believes books are one of life’s great pleasures and should be written about accordingly.
He was editor of FHM in London during its million selling heyday in the 1990s, then moved to New York in 1999 to launch and edit the American version. He was also managing editor of Rolling Stone and editor in chief of US Maxim when that title was the biggest men’s magazine in the world.
Back in the UK he launched and successfully ran a digital creative agency, Grand Parade, for a number of years, and has also developed a number of magazines for Dennis Publishing, including the weekly health and fitness title Coach and The Week for Kids.
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