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. 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.
“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.”
—Patrick Cottrell, The New York Times Book Review
“On the one hand, transmutation means transformation; on the other,
it may suggest change of a specific sort—produced by alchemy or
even radioactive decay. The stories in DiFrancesco’s book flirt
with both, moving between realistic situations and gothic plots to
show us characters in the midst of becoming their real selves,
changing into something new, or even being altered.” —Kirkus
“Whether injecting lake water into their leg to conjure a swamp
thing, using a reusable metal straw to suck up the air around an
irrelevant professor, or dealing with the health concerns specific
to vampires, the characters in Transmutation are tender and real.
The presence of fantastical elements is part of the magic of these
10 stories, which are linked thematically by the changeable nature
of the body. DiFranceso’s alchemy is that every story reveals
someone who is realizing a new version of themselves.”
—Wendy J. Fox, Buzzfeed
"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
With Teeth and 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
"In Transmutation, monsters come in many forms but so does
grace. Here you will find a merciful vampire, a shrewd lobotomized
woman, a repentant rock star, a trans girl finding kinship with a
mythical green hag. Alex DiFrancesco’s characters are outsiders,
often victims of a cruel world, but they are never just victims.
These masterfully wrought stories transmute suffering into a kind
of triumph, in which harsh realities are never softened but are
somehow, sometimes, transcended."
—Jennifer Wortman, author of This. This. This. Is. Love. Love.
Love.
"Transmutation is haunting yet immediate, horrifying yet gorgeous,
stylishly blasphemous yet earnestly spiritual. I expected clever
ghost stories about gender, but what I got will stay with me for a
very long time."
—Meredith Russo, author of If I Was Your Girl
“DiFrancesco’s characters are not simply reflections of who we
appear to be, they are our real selves, the ones we try so very
hard to keep hidden. These stories lay them bare and demand that we
acknowledge them in all of their wondrous imperfection. Grimy, raw,
and glittering with truth, these are portraits of the human
heart.”
—Michael Thomas Ford, author of Shirley Jackson Award finalist
Lily
"Multilayered, poetic, insightful stories that won't let you put
them down. Transmutation is simultaneously an absolute pleasure and
heartache of a read. I thought about the stories in this book for
weeks after I finished them, reliving the small details, searching
for new meaning, which I always found."
—Chavisa Woods, author of Things To Do When You're Goth in the
Country and 100 Times (A Memoir of Sexism)
"These stories howl like Greek furies about everyday cruelty and
the queer monstrous that lives to spite it. Our Nick Cave heir
apparent, DiFrancesco here advances the project of the
Transmasculine Gothic with a haunting instrumentation and an
elegiac rage."
—Jeanne Thornton, author of Summer Fun
"This memorable collection of short stories displays the wild
talent of Alex DiFrancesco to push boundaries and explore the
imagination while simultaneously comforting and strengthening their
readers.” —Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine
"This beautiful collection of stories features trans and queer
characters across many times and places. Some of the stories have
magical elements; others are straight-up realistic. They’re about
family and first love, growing up, queer community, and the weird
disconnect between the world as it is and the world as we
experience it. DiFrancesco’s writing is gorgeous. There’s an eerie
beauty in each of these stories, and the characters all feel
strikingly real." —Laura Sackton, BookRiot
"DiFrancesco takes readers by the hand and guides us into the
darkness so slowly we don’t realize what’s happening until it’s too
late. They’ve pulled us entirely away from reality, from the
comfort and safety of the things which we assumed to be true. They
make us confront the darkness of others and ourselves in ways that
are both disorienting and enlightening. They show the ways people
reach for each other, and seek to understand, and they write about
characters who only know how to violently isolate themselves from
others and from their own humanity.
These stories are ostensibly about monsters, but really, they
explore what it means to be human. Monsters are the things we carry
with us, the things we want to escape, but DiFrancesco shows us
monsters are also nothing to fear or run from. Monsters are
outsiders and outliers, creatures who live on the boundaries of
society and demand to be seen or feared, but they can’t be ignored.
In Transmutation, the monsters are honored and welcomed as a more
true version of their original form, if they started as human, or
an idealized version of human potential. They are, too, the
creeping horror of monsters that live among us—seen, but still not
known until it’s too late.”
—Jessica Mannion, The Rumpus
“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.”
—Publishers Weekly
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