A love story for the VICEgeneration

Ed and Taylor, both aspiring young writers, fall in love during a summer of aimless drinking and partying in their university town of Missoula, Montana. Lonely and looking for love, they connect despite their profound differences: Ed is brooding, ambitious and self-destructive, living in denial of a mysterious tumour spreading from his limbs to his brain. Beautiful Taylor is a pure soul, positive, full of hope and emotional generosity. Their difficult relationship is intense, exciting yet doomed from the start, complicated further when Taylor falls pregnant. As Ed resists the harmony she brings to his life, Taylor's need to protect herself and their child also grows, until a dramatic finale.

Ted McDermott's stark writing speaks truthfully and with a touch of dark humour for and to today's generation of young people trying to find hope in what feels to many like an existential void. The Minor Outsiderwill be read as the young literary voice of our dark times.

Ted McDermott was born in Delaware in 1982, grew up in South Carolina, and now lives with his wife in Philadelphia. He has worked as a cook, a mover, a baker, a college instructor, an encyclopedist and a reporter for an alternative weekly. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in VICE, Believer, Portland Review, Minus Timesand elsewhere. In 2009, he was nominated for The Essay Prize. The Minor Outsideris his first novel.