Bugsy & Other Stories

From the author of Confidence and The Comedown comes a wildly imaginative story collection about queerness, neurodivergence, sexuality, and self-discovery.

Frumkin’s latest book is a deliciously entertaining collection of five genre-defying stories that range from downright hilarious to brilliantly unhinged. Taken together, they celebrate a wide variety of human experiences.

In the title story, a queer young adult with bipolar disorder drops out of college in a fog of depression, aimlessly drifting between maintaining their job at a fast food restaurant and dodging their mom’s texts. But when they fall in with a group of sex workers starring in BDSM films, they find radical freedom, love, and community. In other stories, we meet a psychiatrist whose meticulously-maintained life is upended by an Alex Trebek-like voice in his head, an e-girl celebrity who is being courted by a delusional fan, a young boy on the spectrum at odds with a neurotypical world determined to “cure” him, and an elderly woman whose consciousness is being transformed by her oncoming death.

With incredible insight, compassion, and honesty, Frumkin unravels each story with tantalizing precision. Sexy and raw—and compulsively readable—this collection offers a look at our innermost selves as we all try to make sense of the world and our place in it.

Rafael Frumkin is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Medill School of Journalism. His first novel, The Comedown, was published by Henry Holt in 2018, and his second novel, Confidence, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2023. He lives with his partner, two cats, and one dog in Carbondale, Illinois, where he is an assistant professor of creative writing at Southern Illinois University.