In the years since I lost my brother, I’ve been thinking a lot about the moral force of literature, which didn’t mean much to me as a smirking faux-postmodernist teenager, but means everything to me now. May We Be Forgiven is a deeply moral novel, though it’s never moralistic.
Like Anton Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, and George Saunders, [Seth] Fried is a master at the absurdities, small and large, that make up the human condition. He’s a deeply funny, deeply generous author, and on the basis of The Great Frustration, I’m ready to pay him the biggest compliment I could ever give an author: there’s never been a writer exactly like him before.
NPR book critic Michael Schaub, for our Year In Reading series.
Image Credit: Seth Fried.
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![Like Anton Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, and George Saunders, [Seth] Fried is a master at the absurdities, small and large, that make up the human condition. He’s a deeply funny, deeply generous author, and on the basis of The Great Frustration, I’m ready to pay him the biggest compliment I could ever give an author: there’s never been a writer exactly like him before.
NPR book critic Michael Schaub, for our Year In Reading series.
Image Credit: Seth Fried.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lvoumfEUU81r6xvfko1_1280.jpg)