by Seth Fried

Seth Fried's The Great Frustration is the kind of collection that makes you seethe just a little bit over how well it's conceived, constructed, and written. There are almost no sour notes throughout the eleven stories, and there are plenty of moments of sheer brilliance. Taking small quotients from the greats across every field of prose, Fried is at once channeling Carver, Kafka, Saunders, and Barthelme, while never fully embracing any of them. As debut collections go, The Great Frustration is on par with some of the very best . . . With this collection, [Fried] has, bit by bit, dismantled everything around us that we take for granted. From those pieces, he built an entire new set of rules and axioms, and then further made a whole new, little world that is almost exactly the same as the one that preceded it, just with slight, barely discernible, truly fantastic variations. — BOMB magazine