New From Anxiety Press: Maximum Taxi

Anxiety Press is pleased to announce the release of: Maximum Taxi by Douglas Bales

Blurb

It is a fictionalized, first-person account based on the three years that he spent driving a cab in Chattanooga, TN. It is fast paced, funny, irreverent, and emotionally poignant. The narrator is caught up in a series of odd and sometimes uncomfortable situations with his customers, himself, and the denizens of the city streets, all the while trying to be kind and helpful to the people that he meets in an attempt to improve his own karma. He tries to understand the fallacies of modern society and struggles with the financial decay of the taxi business while he’s fighting to make a living in a menial job.

Reviews

“Maximum Taxi is a captivating, funny, and irreverent tale told by a narrator who exists on the cusp of one world and another. Doug, a down-on-his-luck but resilient cab driver in a rapidly modernizing Southern city, uses his relative anonymity to document his experiences almost as if from behind a camera, seeing everything but rarely being seen. Fans of Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, and Nelson Algren will find a lot to love in Bales’s work.”

-Taylor Gordon, Author/MFA

“Douglas Bales comes from that great tradition of American storytellers. His voice is honest and unpretentious, and the rhythms of his prose lead us through moments that are sometimes light-hearted and always eye-opening. Gritty, darkly comical, compassionate, and heartbreaking... Maximum Taxi is a ride that doesn’t disappoint.”

- David P. Langlinais, Author of Duck Thief and Other Stories

 

About the Author

Douglas (Doug) Bales is a musician and writer from Chattanooga, TN. He has previously had poetry published in Skyline magazine (Vol. 3 Issue 6, 2003), Poem Train, Fast Track Contest (2003, 4 th place), Through the Window (Vol. 1 Issue 1, 2004), Flesh from Ashes (Vol. 3, 2004), Inclement (Vol. 4, Issue 2, 2004), Inclement (Vol. 5, Issue 2, 2005), Current Accounts (Issue 23, 2007), and Defuncted On-line Journal (March, 2023).