Rafael Frumkin

Best Friends (and occasional lovers) Ezra and Orson are teetering on top of the world after founding a company that promises instant enlightenment in this thrilling caper about scams, schemes, and the absurdity of the American Dream. At seventeen, Ezra Green doesn’t have a lot going for him: he’s shorter than average, snaggle-toothed, internet-addicted, and halfway to being legally blind. He’s also on his way to last Chance Camp, the final stop before juvie. But Ezra’s summer at Last Chance turns life-changing when he meets Orson, brilliant and Adonis-like with a mind for hustling. Together, the two embark upon what promises to be a fruitful career of scam artistry. But when they try to pull off their biggest scam yet—Nulife, a corporation that promises its consumers a lifetime of bliss—things start to spin wildly out of control. Searing and charming, with the suspense of The Talented Mr. Ripley, the decadence of The Great Gatsby, and the wit of Succession, Confidence is a story for anyone who knows that the American Dream is just another pyramid scheme.

A Novel

Confidence

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.

Bugsy & Other Stories

A dazzling epic that follows two very different families in Cleveland across generations, beginning with their patriarchs, who become irrevocably intertwined one fateful night A blistering dark comedy, Rafael Frumkin's The Comedown is a romp across America, from the Kent State shootings to protest marches in Chicago to the Florida Everglades, that explores delineating lines of race, class, religion, and time. Scrappy, street smart drug dealer Reggie Marshall has never liked the simpering addict Leland Bloom-Mittwoch, which doesn’t stop Leland from looking up to Reggie with puppy-esque devotion. But when a drug deal goes dramatically, tragically wrong and a suitcase (which may or may not contain a quarter of a million dollars) disappears, the two men and their families become hopelessly entangled. It’s a mistake that sets in motion a series of events that are odd, captivating, suspenseful, and ultimately inevitable. Both incendiary and earnest, The Comedown steadfastly catalogs the tangled messes the characters make of their lives, never losing sight of the beauty and power of each family member’s capacity for love, be it for money, drugs, or each other.

Rafael Frumkin

About

Books

Join the club