Vendor
	Fritz Agency Christian Dittus
Original language
English

TRANSMUTATION

Alex DiFrancesco

Transgressive, transformative short stories that explore the margins of trans lives.

Building on the success of All City, here is a wry, and at the same time dark and risk-taking story collection from author (and baker) Alex DiFrancesco that pushes the boundaries of transgender awareness and filial bonds. There is the hate between 16-year-old Junie, who is transitioning, and their mom's boyfriend Chad when the family moves into Chad's house on Lake Erie. And there is the love being tested between Sawyer and his dad, who named his boat after his child and resists changing it from Sara to Sawyer. There is DiFrancesco's willingness to enter lands that are violent and comfortless in some of these stories, testing the limits of what it means to be human, sometimes returning stronger and wiser and sometimes not returning at all.

ALEX DIFRANCESCO is the author of All City (Seven Stories Press 2019). They have also published fiction in The Carolina Quarterly, The New Ohio Review, and Monkeybicycle. They are a winner of Sundress Academy for the Arts' 2017 OutSpoken contest for LGBTQ+ writing. DiFrancesco's non-
fiction has appeared in The Washington Post, Tin House, Longreads, Brevity, and was a finalist in Cosmonauts Avenue's inaugural non-fiction prize.

Available products
Book Published 2021-06-01 by Seven Stories Press

Comments

Alex DiFrancesco's eclectic, absorbing first collection, "Transmutation," captures moments of in-betweenness (often fraught, sometimes magical) that may be especially familiar to transgender people who are not legible, temporarily or purposefully, to others or themselves... Within these direct, straightforward stories are corridors of solitude and reflection. ... Unlike with the cool remove of, say, Rachel Cusk's fiction, DiFrancesco clearly is not afraid to err on the side of sentimentality. ... At the affective core of "Transmutation" is the question of how we can offer shelter for one another's pain, real and imagined. -- The New York Times Read more...

Transmutation is an eerie darling of a collection. Alex DiFrancesco has written stories here that are so unearthly they feel as if they have gossamer wings, characters lifting off the page to hold court in startling three-dimensional life. Some playful, some terrifying, all crafted with care ...Transmutation is the kind of story collection that will stick with you for days after reading. DiFrancesco is a radiant talent. ---Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of the novel Mostly Dead Things Transmutation is an innovative, magical collection about all the things that pulse with possibility: love in all forms, belonging, reckoning, and reclamation. Each sentence is a gem, multi-faceted and full of light. Alex DiFrancesco has the kind of imagination that saves lives. -- K-Ming Chang, author of Bestiary