Valentine's Day? More Like Stupid-Booger-Fart Day.

It’s that time of year again, folks. Valentine’s Day. It’s time to pick out your sexiest outfit, stuff it with crumpled-up newspapers, and then put it in your bed so you don’t have to sleep alone. It’s time to dim the lights, take out the good silverware, and then eat a Hungry-Man dinner across from a framed photo of Glenn Close. It's time to drink half a box of wine, eat some ice cream with your bare hands, and then wander around town paying panhandlers to say the words "I love you" while giving you eye contact.

In short, it is time for the single grimmest holiday of the year. Or rather, the grimmest holiday of the year for singles.

For people in committed relationships, Valentine’s Day is just another fun reason to go to Applebee’s on a Tuesday. But for single people, it is a day of intense and focused hatred of other people's happiness. All the things about Valentine’s Day that couples enjoy (flowers, handholding, scented candles, movies in which Reese Witherspoon and/or Paul Rudd almost don’t get to be with a person of equivalent attractiveness but then do, hot tubs, cookie cakes shaped like hearts, back rubs, smiling, doing it, etc.) serve as painful reminders for a single person that he or she is alone, grotesque, and unlovable.

So for all you single folk looking to celebrate this holiday in a manner that reflects your actual mood, why not read a book that explores the theme of frustration and solitude in a cathartic, uplifting way? Instead of crying your eyes out while watching Something's Gotta Give on TBS, why not feel comforted in your solitude by stories like The Misery of the Conquistador, The Scribes' Lament, Lie Down and Die, and Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre? Drown out all the trite happiness of your couple friends with 190 pages of gleeful, existential havoc. That's right, it's the perfect time of year to read The Great Frustration.

Anyway, that's definitely how I would plan to spend today, if it weren't for the fact that I'm going to be making out in a hot air balloon with my fiancé Natasha.

Holiday Love

The Great Frustration has been receiving some end-of-the-year love. Here's a quick rundown:

Michael Schaub over at The Millions said that The Great Frustration was the best book he read in 2011. The National Book Critics Circle's Critical Mass called TGF, "certainly one of the most original and startling short story collections of the year." McNally Jackson named it as one of their staff picks over at Gothamist. The MJ staff made special mention of my book due to its inclusion of, "science and sex and explosions." I believe what they meant was science and sexplosions. Opening Ceremony, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Largehearted Boy, Flavorwire, Art Faccia, Heavy Feather Review, and Big Other all included TGF on their best of the year lists. The awesome Corinna Barsan also included a story from TGF in her list of favorite short stories over at Storyville. The also awesome Penina Roth included the same story in her list of favorites as well.

I'm deeply grateful to all of the above for their support of TGF. Thank you to anyone who read and/or talked about the book. I wish you all an excruciatingly happy, mind-bendingly joyful holiday season!

Your Future Finalist

After giving it a medium amount of thought, I am very excited to announce my candidacy to be a finalist for the National Book Award. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the program, the National Book Award is this thing where they put a foil sticker on your book. Then people buy your book because they like stickers. Needless to say, that sounds like exactly the sort of thing I can get behind. And so here we are.

However, I want to emphasize that I am not announcing my candidacy to win the National Book Award. I only want to be a finalist. I'm not greedy. Also, my book isn't about World War II or anything so I don't expect it to win any major literary awards. But a finalist? Why not? I think Al Roker was a finalist one year. It's like jury duty.

So I don't anticipate it being difficult for my book to become a finalist. But! I really want that foil sticker, so I'm not taking any chances. That's why I'm announcing my candidacy publicly. I wanted to make sure that all you Seth-heads out there would know to cast your votes for The Great Frustration.

Now, I know what you're saying: Seth doesn't have devoted fans who refer to themselves as Seth-heads. And also you're saying: Readers don't get to vote for which books win or are finalists for the National Book Award.

Well, guess what? You've just given yourself two pieces of super wrong information: 1.) No such thing as a Seth-head? Then how do you explain the fact that my brother bought ten copies of my book? Or the fact that my morbidly obese basset hound, Hermione, worships the ground I walk on? And don't try to tell me that she's just looking for food that I may have dropped. 2.) Last time I checked, the US was a democracy. A really, really messed up democracy. Furthermore, the US is a nation and "national" is an adjective meaning "of or relating to a nation." ERGO, the National Book Award might as well be called the Get Your Votes In Award.

So if you'd like to vote for my book, just write the National Book Foundation a strongly worded letter. Or you can tweet at them here:

twitter.com/nationalbook

Remember, the squeaky wheel gets the oil. So when you're recommending my book to them, make sure to be as rude as you feel comfortable being.

That's all for now Seth-heads! I know I can count on your votes.

My Sales Figures

Let's cut the crap. Publishing is a business. The only books that are important are the ones that sell. It doesn't matter how "good" a book is or how many "pages" it has. What matters is how many people it makes stinking, throw-up-in-a-diamond-bucket rich.

So while I'm very proud of my book's cultural/critical/artistic achievements (ever since it came out this May it has been playing the zeitgeist like a guitar it bought at a garage sale), the only thing that can really be used to measure its success is huge burlap sacks filled with nasty cash.

That's why I've decided to post my book's sales figures right here on this blog... The only problem is that everyone who has seen The Great Frustration's numbers firsthand has been so blown away by its commercial success that they have either a.) moved to the mountains and become hermits or b.) spontaneously ripped their own heads off. So the exact sales figures are not available to me.

But, using the information at my disposal, I have managed to come up with what I feel is a pretty accurate report on the book's progress:

This Monday (July, 25th) a friend of mine named Shawn told me he was thinking of buying my book, which I'm assuming he later went on to do. The very next day (July, 26th) I spoke to two of my family members who said that they were both also planning to purchase a copy of my book eventually. Therefore, my sales doubled in a two-day period. In business analytics, this is what's called a "trend."

Figure 1 (Extrapolation of Trend)

Examining this trend even further, you'll find that by August 13th over 500,000 people will have bought my book.

Figure 2 (Further Extrapolation of Trend)

And exactly one-third of those people will be named Shawn.

Figure 3 (Proportion of Shawns)

And when you consider the fact that Shawn is not a particularly common name, it becomes obvious that 500,000 is a rather conservative estimate. After all, my book is probably also being purchased by Peters and Susans and Ambers and Jacobs and Sarahs and Angelas and guys whose friends call them Spud and Jasons and Tonys and Chets and Montagues and the list goes on. Amandas and Stevens and Beauregards and Tiffanys and Malcolms and Jamals and Warners.

In any event, the point I’m trying to make here is not that money is the most important thing in the world. Just in publishing. And while its commercial success does not necessarily mean that you will like my book, it does mean that not liking it would make you evil and strange.

End of post!

Search and Replace

This is a book trailer I made using Notepad's Search and Replace function. This just proves that you don't need a big budget to make a book trailer. All you need is a word processor, lots of spare time, and the heart of a lion.

In Stores Now

Praisepocalypse: People Saying Nice Things About My Book

"Seth Fried is a pure delight to read--his stories are like parables from some alternate sci-fi Bible, funny and wise and generous, deeply strange and even more deeply familiar."

--Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

"The 11 stories in Fried's debut have the vigor of adventures ... there's a strain of absurdism in his prose that combines pathos, unease, and dark humor to add depth and give these stories a sense of modernity and relevance."

--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"Seth Fried's stories are laugh-out-loud hilarious and wonderfully weird, yet his many strange worlds also have the power to haunt, echoing the sorrows and yearnings of ordinary life in the way dreams can. This is an inspired and inspiring collection from an important new young writer."

--Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply

"... perfectly controlled and irresistibly propulsive."

--The Portland Mercury

"In The Great Frustration, Seth Fried creates elaborate set pieces, populates them with living, breathing characters, arranges them for maximum chaos, and then sets it all in motion, inviting you to watch catastrophe and disaster and ruin. Even if you wanted to stop reading, you couldn't: his sentences drive you forward with a relentless rhythm, breaking your heart, then reassembling it, then breaking it again, and you don't even mind, because, oh yeah, while he's doing this he's also making you laugh out loud."

--Charles Yu, author of How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

"Playful, occasionally absurd ... These stories have the antic comedy of Monty Python, but the characters resemble the lost boys of Judd Apatow. Grade: A-"

--Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Fried often goes in for the kill when you least expect it, mining an emotional depth from his intensely flawed characters that is rare in debut fiction ... The Great Frustration is the type of debut story collection I love reading."

--The Rumpus

"These powerful and beautifully absurd stories create poetry from the collected voice of those who love and hate and dream and yearn. They stirred my imagination and time and time again seduced me into reflecting on the hopefulness and vulnerabilities of being human. The Great Frustration is a wonderfully original debut."

--Alan Heathcock, author of Volt

"Weirdly wonderful, Fried’s story collection inhabits equally the philosophical and the visceral."

--ZYZZYVA

"Seth Fried’s stories have extraordinary range, reminiscent of Borges, allowing the reader to become a time-traveler in a world populated by 21^st century misadventures with prehistoric bones and a bestiary of microscopic beasts. You will enter the Garden of Eden the very moment before disasters began. His voice and imagination will dazzle you."--Thaisa Frank, author of Heidegger's Glasses

"Seth Fried has a wildly humorous imagination, but also sharp technical skills and beauty of language that weaves deep examinations of self and humanity into the inner folds of his crazy worlds. He’s channeling Saunders by way of Barthelme and Kafka, but also clearing a whole new territory of his own. Listen up and open this book: Seth Fried is the future of fiction."

--Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief

"These stories are joyful, breathtaking, and ridiculously funny. Yes, there is darkness and violence and the constant threat of unhappy endings, but Fried is such a stunning writer, you actually love the coming disaster because it is so perfectly presented on the page."

--Kevin Wilson, author of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth and The Family Fang

"Seth Fried should not be read by those with a heart condition, or by women who are nursing or pregnant. Do not read Seth Fried when driving or operating heavy machinery. Because his stories are not only addictive, but dangerously good. He will make your heart stop and your jaw drop. You will suffer from bouts of thoughtful silence and seizures of hilarity and may even soil yourself with pleasure. Consider yourself warned."

--Benjamin Percy, author of The Wilding and Refresh, Refresh

Fifty-Two Stories/The Magazine of Yoga/Poets & Writers

The official pub date of my book is today! In celebration of this awesome fact, you can now read the title story of my collection over at Cal Morgan's Fifty-Two Stories.

Also, there's a new interview with me up a The Magazine of Yoga. Topics covered: Compost, failure, and cage fighting.

Double also, Poets & Writers has posted a video of mine to their site. This is either a huge step toward legitimacy for me or a huge step away from legitimacy for Poets & Writers. Either way, I'm pretty excited.

Andrew's Book Club

Incredibly excited to announce that The Great Frustration has been selected as the May pick for Andrew's Book Club. I am a huge fan of ABC, so this is a huge honor. You can read an interview I did with Andrew here. Topics covered: Dinosaur comedians, food fights, and MST3k.

Don't Spend a Dime: A Guide to Supporting Seth Fried's Debut Collection On The Cheap

Times are tight. In recent years most families have been forced to cut their debut short story collection budgets dramatically, if not eliminate them altogether. But not to worry! There are plenty of ways you can support my forthcoming collection without spending so much as one hot round American dime.

1.) Fill out an acquisition request form at the library.

Even if you can't purchase my book, you can still convince your library to grab a copy. Most libraries are run by nice people who want you to have access to the books you're interested in, so they should take your request to heart. However, while you're talking to them make sure you pronounce it "library" and not "lie-berry." That will help prevent them from throwing out your acquisition request form.

2.) Only have sex with people who have bought my book.

Not only will this incentivise people to buy my book in the short term, but in a few generations we might even be able to eliminate the genetic traits that cause people not to buy my book.

3.) Give my book a positive rating on Amazon and Goodreads.

I know what you're thinking: How can I give your book a positive rating if I haven't read it? But, let's face it, it's not like that would make you the first person to post an opinion on the internet despite the fact that you have no idea what you're talking about.

In order to help you out, I've written a few reviews for my book that you can adapt for your own purposes:

"The Great Frustration? More like the great short story collection!"

-Trent Banister, Stairville MA

"If I could travel back in time, the second thing I would do (right after making out with Helen of Troy and right before smacking Adolf Hitler in the face with a pipe) would be to sit down and enjoy this book for the first time all over again."

-Dr. Leroy Fice, Biosphere 2

4.) Social media the book with social media.

This one is easy. Just Facebook link some Facebook links. Tweet some tweets. Do whatever it is Tumblr does with your Tumblr account. Write a heart-melting love ballad about my book and upload the song to Youtube. Go on MySpace and design a really busy profile layout in which animated gifs of my book bounce up and down to the music of some obscure screamcore band.

5.) Ask a loved one to get you a copy for your birthday.

Happy Birthday!!!

6.) Borrow my book from a friend of yours and don't return it.

That way the friend will be forced to replace his or her copy and you will have effectively purchased my book.

7.) Send my book good vibes.

If you are a hippy, then you might be in a position to send my book good vibes. If so, please do.

8.) Find people sending my book bad vibes and stop them at all costs.

If you are a hippy who also happens to have a crazy vigilante component to your personality, then you might want to take to the streets and prevent people from sending my book bad vibes.

9.) Make a mental note to check out my book when you're a little more flush.

Yeah! No big deal. No reason to stress about it right now. You're going to get that big promotion. I just know it. And when you do, my book will be waiting to congratulate you.

#thegreatfrustration

T minus three weeks till The Great Frustration is released! It pretty much goes without saying that such a momentous event would be accompanied by a Twitter hashtag campaign. And yet, I still feel compelled to point out that this momentous event will be accompanied by a Twitter hashtag campaign.

Every day for the next three weeks I will use my twitter feed to express my frustration about whatever's sticking in my craw. Each tweet will be followed by #thegreatfrustration. Anyone who wants to express their own frustrations is more than welcome. Just make sure to put #thegreatfrustration after your frustrated tweet. Because if you don't, then you're not participating in this Twitter campaign and are just complaining for no reason, which is an unattractive quality.

twitter.com/seth_fried

The Books Have Arrived!!!

Just received the contract copies of The Great Frustration. This picture was taken before I dumped the books onto the ground and began rolling around in them euphorically.

A Complete List of All Books

In order to celebrate the fact that my debut short story collection, The Great Frustration, will be released in about a month, I have decided to compile a list of all the books that have ever been published. In addition to it being a fun opportunity to promote TGF, I figured it could serve as a scholarly resource (which is pretty much how I think of my blog anyway). Without further ado, here they are in no particular order:

Graham's French to English Dictionary

The Helicopter Joke Book

Jump-Around Howie's Big Book of Obvious Riddles

The Panther in the Cauldron: A Diaper Lewis Mystery

A Parent's Guide to Making Your Children Invincible to Witches

How to Tell Which Children Are Invincible to You: A Witch's Handbook

Mission to Cars: How to Attend an Auto Show

Dr. Paul d'Artagnan's Low Calorie Workout

Also:

Phone books

It's pretty humbling to see all those titles listed one after another. It's enough to make me realize that The Great Frustration will be little more than a grain of sand in an immense desert. Nevertheless, as far as grains of sand go, it's going to be awesome. Oh, also: Huckleberry Finn.

Starred Review in Publishers Weekly

I am incredibly pleased to report that Publishers Weekly has just given The Great Frustration a starred review. In fact, "pleased" might be underselling it. All day long I have been climbing skyscrapers and swatting at biplanes. PW had this to say:

The 11 stories in Fried's debut have the vigor of adventures, taking place in settings as disparate as Spain in the time of the conquistadors, a king's harem, a city under siege, various scientific setups, and--in the case of the title story--the Garden of Eden. Such an imagination is refreshing, but even more rewarding is that the stories don't rely solely on concept or conceit, and trudge forward into the lovely mess of strong characters wedged into dramatic circumstance. The scientists in "Those of Us in Plaid" have a simple, though not easy, objective involving an obstinate monkey and a space capsule. Science is clearly one of Fried's major interests: "Loeka Discovered" follows a team of researchers reconstructing ancient history from bits of bone and other artifacts. The lengthy "Animalcula: A Young Scientist's Guide to New Creatures" offers 15 scholarly descriptions of minuscule fauna, creating a fictional microcosm and illuminating it with the surprisingly poetic inner life of the scientist studying his subjects. While Fried's stories run to the historical or technical, there's a strain of absurdism in his prose that combines pathos, unease, and dark humor to add depth and give these stories a sense of modernity and relevance. (May)

This means one of two things: 1.) Publishers Weekly got the cigars I sent, or 2.) Publishers Weekly liked my book. Either way, I haven't received a star on a piece of writing since grade school and it still feels pretty great. Huge thanks to PW!

Blurb Attack: Endorseapocalypse

There's only 74 days (or, 6,393,600 seconds) left before The Great Frustration is released. In anticipation of this culture-changing event, Counterpoint Press/Soft Skull has put together the greatest team of blurbers ever assembled in the long, storied history of jacket copy.

All of these writers are people I admire to a ridiculous degree. It's a total thrill to see them say nice things about TGF. As a thank you, I've written this blurb blurbing their blurbs:

"The blurbs for Seth Fried's debut short story collection are transcendent, each a triumph of the form. This is the most electric set of blurbs I've read in years. I cannot recommend these endorsements enough."

--Seth Fried

And now, the actual blurbs:

"Seth Fried has a wildly humorous imagination, but also sharp technical skills and beauty of language that weaves deep examinations of self and humanity into the inner folds of his crazy worlds. He’s channeling Saunders by way of Barthelme and Kafka, but also clearing a whole new territory of his own. Listen up and open this book: Seth Fried is the future of fiction."

--Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief

"Seth Fried's stories are laugh-out-loud hilarious and wonderfully weird, yet his many strange worlds also have the power to haunt, echoing the sorrows and yearnings of ordinary life in the way dreams can. This is an inspired and inspiring collection from an important new young writer."

--Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply

"In The Great Frustration, Seth Fried creates elaborate set pieces, populates them with living, breathing characters, arranges them for maximum chaos, and then sets it all in motion, inviting you to watch catastrophe and disaster and ruin. Even if you wanted to stop reading, you couldn't: his sentences drive you forward with a relentless rhythm, breaking your heart, then reassembling it, then breaking it again, and you don't even mind, because, oh yeah, while he's doing this he's also making you laugh out loud."

--Charles Yu, author of How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

"These stories are joyful, breathtaking, and ridiculously funny. Yes, there is darkness and violence and the constant threat of unhappy endings, but Fried is such a stunning writer, you actually love the coming disaster because it is so perfectly presented on the page."

--Kevin Wilson, author of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth and The Family Fang

"Seth Fried should not be read by those with a heart condition, or by women who are nursing or pregnant. Do not read Seth Fried when driving or operating heavy machinery. Because his stories are not only addictive, but dangerously good. He will make your heart stop and your jaw drop. You will suffer from bouts of thoughtful silence and seizures of hilarity and may even soil yourself with pleasure. Consider yourself warned."

--Benjamin Percy, author of The Wilding and Refresh, Refresh

"These powerful and beautifully absurd stories create poetry from the collected voice of those who love and hate and dream and yearn. They stirred my imagination and time and time again seduced me into reflecting on the hopefulness and vulnerabilities of being human. The Great Frustration is a wonderfully original debut."

--Alan Heathcock, author of Volt

"Seth Fried’s stories have extraordinary range, reminiscent of Borges, allowing the reader to become a time-traveler in a world populated by 21^st century misadventures with prehistoric bones and a bestiary of microscopic beasts. You will enter the Garden of Eden the very moment before disasters began. His voice and imagination will dazzle you."

--Thaisa Frank, author of Heidegger's Glasses

24 Stories 12 Weeks: The Great Frustration Pre-Publication Read-ebration

My debut short story collection is coming out in three months. In the publishing world three months is a very short amount of time. Whereas, for the rest of us, three months is a massive expanse of time that's as difficult to conceptualize as the distance between two galaxies.

It is for this reason that I've come up with The Great Frustration Pre-Publication Read-ebration (here I want to point out that the word "read-ebration" is a new word I came up with by smashing the word "read" into the word "celebration" and that this new word is my creative property). Participation is easy. And if you have a library card it's also free. For each week leading up to the release of my book, go find and read the short stories listed for that week (see below).

The selected stories are all so mind-bogglingly good that before you know it the three months will be up. There will be nothing standing between you and my book except possibly your own lack of interest. Enjoy!

Week 1
The Glass Mountain by Donald Barthelme (City Life)
Mississippi by Rick Bass (The Watch)

Week 2
The Adventure of the Bather by Italo Calvino (Difficult Loves)
The Rememberer by Aimee Bender (The Girl in the Flammable Skirt)

Week 3
Kafka Cooks Dinner by Lydia Davis (Varieties of Disturbance)
Bigfoot Stole My Wife by Ron Carlson (The News of the World)

Week 4
The Guest by Stanley Elkin (Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers)
Pet Milk by Stuart Dybek (The Coast of Chicago)

Week 5
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers (The Ballad of the Sad Cafe)
Some Other, Better Otto by Deborah Eisenberg (Twilight of the Superheros)

Week 6
Realism by Charles Yu (Third Class Superhero)
The Dinosaurs by Italo Calvino (Cosmicomics)

Week 7
The Magic Poker by Robert Coover (Pricksongs and Descants)
B Positive by Michael Czyzniejewski (Elephants in Our Bedroom)

Week 8
Paradise Park by Steven Millhauser (The Knife Thrower)
Dog Days by Judy Budnitz (Flying Leap)

Week 9
Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog by Stephanie Vaughn (Sweet Talk)
A Common Misunderstanding by Franz Kafka (The Complete Stories)

Week 10
Thomas Edison and Vasil Golakov by Lydia Millet (Love in Infant Monkeys)
But Soft ... Real Soft by Woody Allen (Without Feathers)

Week 11
Signifying Nothing by David Foster Wallace (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men)
The Joke by J. David Stevens (Mexico is Missing)

Week 12
The Balloon by Donald Barthelme (Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts)
The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World by G. Garcia Marquez (Collected Stories)

I Will Continue Making Trailers Until Someone Stops Me