Bugsy book cover features an image of a glass platform heeled shoe

Bugsy & Other Stories

Simon & Schuster (2024)

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.

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Praise for

Bugsy & Other Stories

  • "The collection’s greatest strength is its way of unpacking its characters’ stuck moments and impasses through vivid gasps of insight, moments when we come into contact with the abundance of their inner life. For each of them, the obscure whole of their identity is beyond easy summarization — but as they grope their way through crises both existential and mundane, every moment feels bracingly true."

    Alexandra Kleeman, The New York Times

  • "Despite the radical empathy that he has for his characters, Frumkin’s writing has a visceral sharpness that tends to cut into his readers. Much like his characters’ frequent skin picking or Bugsy’s desire to cut as close to a vein as possible, Frumkin has a flinch-inducing frankness on difficult topics such as self-harm. It’s our intimacy with these characters that lets us feel the cuts they make, both literal and metaphorical, feel sharp as if on our own skin."

    Brendan Tynan Buck, Newcity Lit

  • "Frumkin excels at getting into the distinct and sometimes dissociated mindset of his characters. It’s an impressive depiction of life on the margins."

    Publishers Weekly