B.C. Edwards read The Great Frustration, Seth Fried’s inaugural collection of short fiction, and now he’s depressed that it’s over.

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.

The titular story is a simple-in-concept, tricky-in-presentation piece. It concerns a moment in the lives of the fauna of the Garden of Eden, some time before Eve eats the famed apple, before the veil on the world’s true nature is lifted and all the animals (not just man) realize their predatory inclinations. The frustration so elegantly described is the inclination for the cat to eat the canary, but absent is any comprehension of how to go about doing this or why it should want to in the first place. Throughout the collection Fried catches his subjects at moments like this—on the path to being fully formed—the clerk who is suddenly and without warning installed in his king’s harem, slowly making sense of a new life, a siege that lasts so long that the city under attack is nearly abandoned save for the few last soldiers trying to sort out who exactly they are defending against, what exactly they are protecting, what comes next, and what comes a hundred years from now. “The Misery of the Conquistador” does this with a single moment in time, remembered over and over again, altered with each remembrance, belying a palpable ache and a regret for an entire life lived. Like the very physical Loeka, a Neanderthal trapped in ice in the middle of climbing a mountain, every subject in Fried’s book is caught at exactly the right moment, frozen, and forced to recognize its own inherent incompleteness.

But the best example of Fried’s skill is the final piece of the collection. “Animacula: A Young Scientist’s Guide to New Creatures” is a fifteen-part story—almost a novella—which classifies and describes a collection of newly discovered creatures from the Kessel whose life span is so infinitely small, half-a-million generations would have lived, bred, and died in the time it takes a bullet to travel across a firing range. Not only are each of the creatures themselves a tiny spark of sheer imagination, but the construction of the Animacula as a whole bears a remarkable depth. The narrator/author cajoles the young scientist who is studying the primer, berates him, congratulates him for making it this far, and for bothering to read and study science at all. In a few simple strokes, Fried constructs an entire new world in which this Animacula lives. “[Y]ou have two options,” the narrator says. “1.) You can reject everything, and regard the world as baseless fiction or 2.) You can take the information that your senses give you, albeit incomplete and interpretive, and attempt to derive from it rules and principles.”

With his collection, Fried has simultaneously done both of these things. He 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.

The Great Frustration is available now from Soft Skull Press.

B.C. Edwards lives in Brooklyn. He is the recipient of the 2011 Hudson Prize put out by Black Lawrence Press which will be publishing his collection of short fiction, The Aversive Clause in 2012 and his collection of poetry From the Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes in 2013. His work can be found in Red Line Blues, The Sink Review, Food-i-Corp, Hobart and others. His short story “Illfit” is being adapted into a piece by the Royal Ballet of Flanders. He is also a Literary Death Match Champion and has the medal to prove it.