From the author of Transmutation comes a linked collection of speculative short fiction that follows a woman navigating surreal jobs in a near-future dystopia, in which people have become completely numb to their emotions following a cataclysmic event.
How do you tell the story of being human in an unfeeling world?
After an unnamed tragedy renders humanity numb, Gemma must wrestle with the void of indifference. She works a series of jobs—at a grief-infused coffee shop, a boxing gym for pain therapy, a graveyard, and more—and encounters a range of eccentric characters struggling to survive in a world where grief, ecstasy, suffering, and joy are commodities for some to purchase and for others to exploit. Gemma’s path is one of glimmering possibilities, ones with feelings she may not understand or accept.
The Grief Shop is a remarkable meditation on what it is to be—even when the very characteristics that make us human have been stripped away.
Thursday, June 4 2026 7PM
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From the author of ...
June 14, 2026
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ALEX DIFRANCESCO is the author of the dystopian novel All City, the story collection reflecting trans realities Transmutation, and the memoir Breaking the Curse (2024). About their debut story collection, Patrick Cottrell wrote in The New York Times: “At the affective core of Transmutation is the question of how we can offer shelter for one another’s pain, real and imagined.” They are the winner of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for 2022, and their novel All City was the first awards finalist by a transgender author for the Ohioana Book Awards in its eighty-year history. They served as an assistant editor for Sundress Publications in Tennessee, and edited LGBTQIA+ non-fiction for Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Their work has appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature, Pacific Standard, Eater, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among others. DiFrancesco lives in Philadelphia.
