Taxi - Softcover

'Taking taxis in New York is usually an adventure and occasionally a risk,' says Christina Oxenberg. The hundred or so taxi stories she’s collected from both sides of the partition window make that an understatement. ‘All the drivers are crazy’ seems nearer the mark, like the intellectual who drives in order to subsidize his search for the ‘Negative’ Scienza Nuova of Giamattista Vico or the immigrant who takes to the wheel because ‘it requires no prior experience, no knowledge of English and no familiarity with the geography of New York’. Ms Oxenberg describes another driver as ‘the living embodiment of urban paranoia’, but judging by some of the celebrities’ reactions to her request for stories the tag applies equally well to many passengers. Some of these will be interested to find the exact wording of their refusals here. Fairbanks Junior, Diana Vreeland, Quentin Crisp, Any Warhol and Catherine Oxenberg, whose driver, in a bid to pick her up, promised to get her a spot on Dynasty. This fully illustrated book is as redolent of New York City as the yellow taxi describes. The back of the cab serves as an arena for metaphysical discussion, copulation, homicide, drug abuse and literary quotation. Celebrities apart, the passengers include an incontinent lion cub and Franco Rossilini’s puppy Gramophone, who gets slung into a shop window by a demented driver. More often it’s your tip that gets slung in your face. As Ms Oxenberg dryly remarks, ‘Taxi Driving is not a passive sport.’ Sharp observation and a diligent disregard for contributors’ requests for anonymity ensure that the place for this book is your bookshelf.

Christina Oxenberg was born, and briefly raised, in NewYork City. This was followed by prolonged stays in London, then Madrid, then back to New York before returning to London, and so on, until after fourteen schools and a multitudinous array of stepparents and their tribes of offspring, a precedent for adventure was set. Bypassing University, Oxenberg plunged into a whirlpool of random employment, everything from researcher to party organizer to art dealer to burger flipper. Oxenberg's single true love is writing and she published her first book,TAXI, a collection of anecdotes, in 1986. Despite the lousy pay, Oxenberg published articles in Allure Magazine, The London Sunday Times Magazine, Tattler, Salon.com, Penthouse and anyone else who would have her. In 2000 Oxeberg was seduced by the offer of a regular paycheck and she fell down the rabbit-hole world of fine fibers. In the blink of an eye a decade vanished into an unwieldy wool business. With relief she returns to the relative calm of writing fiction. Between excursions, she lives in NewYork City.