Rafael Frumkin

“When I was seventeen I could still see well enough to read. My reading was a trait my parents admired without sharing it themselves. They described me to their friends as “bookish.” Really, I just appreciated how static and parsable words were on a page, how little they demanded of me visually. I liked books that took a long time to read, which meant that I read a lot of Russian novels, and The Brothers Karamazov was my favorite. I was reading it for the third time at Last Chance, imagining that I was Alyosha, a saint surrounded by sinners. I especially liked the part where the Elder Zosima described his childhood: I was the sickly elder brother who inspired him to become a man of the cloth, or maybe I was Zosima himself, who Alyosha prayed both for and with. The book had as many examples of how to be good as it had examples of how to be bad. It stretched for miles in my head.”
― Rafael Frumkin, Confidence

“It had taken four months to write and she had felt something stir in her as she worked that she had thought was long dead.”
― Rebekah Frumkin, The Comedown