i'm driving a prosthetic leg to my grandpa in kansas

When i've had my day's fill of literary criticism and gender theory, I've been turning to The Potential Hazards of Hester Day. By 26-year old Mercedes Helnwein, this is just the latest in a series of young novelists to carve deeper into my inferiority complex. Not only is she a stupidly young published novelist, but she's stupidly beautiful, and the book is effing great. A wry, witty mash-up between Tao Lin and Richard Milward, a dysfunctional new-millenium Kerouacian romp through the bowels of mid-town America.

Some excerpts:

(Hester, identifying exactly how I felt around 9 years ago)

"I tried sometimes to be tackled by mysterious depressions and problems that would make life interesting. I tried to be engulfed in frowns that nobody could possibly understand and so be looked upon as a beautiful, tragic enigma. That was my ambition for awhile -- to be incomprehensible. I realized later that I had been incomprehensible lost of the time anyway, just not in an advantageous, romantic way."

"You see, for so many years, every time I talked, people looked at me like I was really just vomiting in a public space."

(And pin-pointing exactly how every girl feels when she inevitably discovers that a burst of passionate activity measures nowhere on the guy's scale of significance:)

"How do you pretend you aren't interested? It was strange, fixating so hard on nothingness when it is such a blatant lie. How do you avoid the impertinent embarrassments of reality? How do you sit through that and smile with the nonchalance and grace of boredom?

'I just want to know why we would make out like we did yesterday."

'I dunno. Jethro was taking a piss. Seemed like the thing to do at the time.'

That made me feel like scratching a long line across the hood of his car with those scissors we kept in the glove compartment for self-defense. But I guess I was too old for that. Or too sensible. Or too senseless. Something like that. 

'Well,' I said, reaching for the door, 'I'm going to start smoking again.'" 

[further reasons to love her: her love for the white stripes goes deep, too.]