Transmutation
Stories
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
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 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 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.
DiFrancesco's first novel All City (Seven Stories 2019) was praised by Publishers Weekly as a "loving, grieving warning [that] thoughtfully traces the resilience, fragility, and joy of precarious communities in an immediate, compassionate voice." All City was one of BookRiot's "Best Post-Apocalyptic Books of 2019," Entropy Mag's "Best of 2019," and Largehearted Boy's "Favorite Novels of 2019." It was a finalist for the 2019 Ohioana Book Award for Fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
DiFrancesco's sharp and sometimes fantastical collection (after the novel All City) depicts a series of challenges faced by outsiders. Junie, the young trans protagonist of "Inside My Saffron Cave" suffers the tyranny of her mother's abusive boyfriend Chad, whose house they've just moved into. "The Ledger of the Deep" portrays a warmer familial relationship, but not one without problems. The complexity of Dad's feelings is represented by his resistance to renaming Sara, his beloved boat, now that daughter Sara has become Sawyer. The collection's title signals DiFrancesco's often whimsical exploration of various types of change. In "The Disappearance," an aging academic's public screed against minority poets leads to his literal progressive vanishing. The boundless love of a vampire lies at the center of "The Pure," while gypsies and a monster inhabit the eerie folkloric "The Wind, the Wind." "The Chuck Berry Tape Massacre" is the longest and most ambitious story, with parallel woven narratives. One thread follows the descent into lunacy of single mother Kay and the abandonment of her two daughters; the other fancifully charts the obsessive quest of a music lover named Jack Tran. How these narratives connect is left to the reader to decide. Whether striking chords that are playful, poignant, or both at once, this collection consistently charms.
