The Grief Shop

Name: The Grief Shop
Price: 35 AUD
Availability: PreOrder
ISBN: 9781644215531

and Other Stories from a Broken World

Alex DiFrancesco

$35

Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

Seven Stories Press,U.S.
07 July 2026

Short stories

From the author of Transmutation comes a linked collection of speculative short fiction following a woman who navigates surreal jobs in a near-future dystopia, where people have become completely numb to their emotions following a cataclysmic event.

The Grief Shop and Other Stories from a Broken World takes place after ""the tragedy"" transforms everyone into unfeeling people. At the center of the book is Gemma, who must cope with attempting to feel in light of the numbness. She works a series of jobs-at a grief-infused coffee shop, a boxing gym for pain therapy, a graveyard, and more-encountering 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 dares to wonder- how do we tell the story of being human when the very things that make us human have been stripped away from us?

By: Alex DiFrancesco
Imprint: Seven Stories Press,U.S.
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 210mm, Width: 140mm,
Weight: 369g
ISBN: 9781644215531
ISBN 10: 1644215535
Pages: 160
Publication Date: 07 July 2026
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

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.

Reviews for The Grief Shop: and Other Stories from a Broken World

""Sharp, inventive, and deeply human, The Grief Shop is a look at how emotions make us who we are and the way those same feelings link us together. Simultaneously zooming in to the personal and out to the global, DiFrancesco is an astute observer of how we all tick."" —Never Angeline Nørth, author of SARA or 'I lived my life as a cloud that followed overhead' ""With their latest collection, Alex DiFrancesco brings us quiet, melancholy stories from a future just a few moments away. The Grief Shop and Other Stories From a Broken World holds space for both the deep alienation and profound emotional texture of our contemporary world, and a world just around the corner.”—Cavar, author of Failure to Comply