Transmutation, Alex DiFrancesco
Transmutation, Alex DiFrancesco
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Transmutation
Stories

Author: Alex DiFrancesco

Narrator: Kirsten Potter

Unabridged: 3 hr 18 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/22/2022


Synopsis

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. Here is the hate between sixteen-year-old Junie, who is transitioning, and their mom's boyfriend Chad when the family moves into Chad's house on Lake Erie. And here 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 now. 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 as their characters surge forward into unknown spaces.

Contains mature themes.

About Alex DiFrancesco

Alex DiFrancesco is the author of All City. 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. Their storytelling has been featured at the Fringe Festival, Life of the Law, the Queens Book Festival, and The Heart podcast. DiFrancesco is also a skilled bread baker and pastry cook, a passionate activist and advocate, and has a small, wonderful cat named Sylvia Rivera-Katz.


Reviews

‘He could hear something real and eternal and human. Some sort of soul in exile and torture.’ There is a cleverness to the title Transmutation for Alex DiFrancesco’s short story collection: to transform is to undergo a visible change, but to transmute is a process of moving from one state into anothe......more

Goodreads review by Bill

I really liked DiFrancesco's Psychopomps, not so much her novel. The stories here mostly have gentle surfaces that hide darker, complex subtexts. There are often hints of magic realist elements, that may or may not manifest unambiguously. I'm reminded a bit of Aickman's open-ended tales, but with qu......more

Goodreads review by Martie

Genre: Speculative /Supernatural/Transgender Fiction Publisher: Seven Stories Press Pub. Date: June 22, 2021 The ten stories in DiFrancesco’s book fluctuate between tales that are realistic, gothic, and way-out-there, meaning bizarre. The characters are in the process of becoming their real selves or c......more

These are incredibly beautiful, nuanced, varied. Alex DiFrancesco uses words like weapons, delivering the most tender knockout to their readers. This book is a testimony to the eleventy jillion brutal and beautiful ways there are to be queer, human, and sometimes inhuman. This book is a slow burn an......more