Praise for Jac Jemc "To Jemc the world is a place where each person, every human cypher, must devour another. What then can we do, if we are devoured, if we are overcome with our own devouring? Her escape plan is inspired and ancient -- to become protean, to dwell in costume after costume, parcelling away the truth that can be found in each. But where is it hid? Ask her, though she may not say."-- Jesse Ball "Jac Jemc is an artisan. A Different Bed Every Time stays with you long after you''ve finished reading. Every story is painstakingly crafted with words and imagery that are honed and placed just so, creating a mosaic you feel grateful, exhilarated, thrilled to experience." -- Lindsay Hunter "Jac Jemc''s stories are bright, sharp, mysterious gifts, designed to enchant and unsettle. Jemc is a boundlessly inventive talent, and A Different Bed Every Time is a mythic and essential collection.
Prepare to be awed." " -- Laura van den Berg "Her work has been distinguished by a sort of cold beauty, a precision that opens up space in her stories, and My Only Wife reads as the finest expression of that aesthetic." -- Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago "So beautifully rendered but emotionally wrenching." -- Christopher Higgs, HTMLGiant "Like so many polished surfaces that come together, refracting light as they do, My Only Wife gains meaning, effect, through accretion of detail. One comes to feel the husband''s sense of loss, his grief, sharply, poignantly, by the novel''s end." -- Jessica Treat, Drunken Boat " My Only Wife is a sneaky book. It guiles the reader with clean prose and apparent simplicity into believing that it''s a novel about the narrator''s only wife. It may be about many things - about absence, emptiness, and loss - but it really isn''t about the narrator''s only wife.
It''s more like an empty glass from the cupboard, an abstraction, a form, and it invites us to fill it with particulars from our own experience." -- David Allan Barker, Nouspique "The book asks us to consider the differences between understanding the ones we love, the limits of that understanding, and the flaws of attempting to understand how we understand them. Perhaps this last point is the step that goes too far, where life de-solidifies and confusingly comes apart in our hands. It forces us to examine ourselves, whether we are the wife, who has crossed over into disappearance, or the husband: broken, humiliated, but remaining in life." -- Jarret Middleton, Small Doggies " My Only Wife is a novel for readers who want to engage with, rather than be merely entertained by, characters, writing and ideas. Jemc has a distinctive style, using some non-traditional elements such as repetition in sentence openings and stand-alone sentences, that convey artistic confidence and that force the reader to pay attention to both what is said and how it is said." -- Jennifer Messner, Books, Personally "Reading Jac Jemc''s novel My Only Wife casts a somewhat strange (in that good sense related to excellent fiction), thrilling dream." -- Justin Nicholes, Our Stories " My Only Wife opens with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson: "That those who know her, know her less, the nearer her they get.
" This is the reader''s obsession and compulsion and joy, shared by the husband, who has been left, who recounts for us the stories of his wife. This novel is so well-written, so well-crafted, I was constantly torn between slowing down to linger in the wonderful prose and speeding up to chase the intoxicating story, which is to say, the intoxicating wife. A woman who rips pages from her favorite books, tosses the pages out of windows for passersby below to find and read. A woman who erases the first love letter her husband ever wrote her because it was written in pencil (and for a more heartbreaking reason I won''t divulge here). A woman who collects oral histories of strangers, records them secluded in a closet, out of earshot of her husband. A woman you''d expect to find in a foreign film, where women are celebrated for their strength and wit and independent spirit and unknowability. And while we are making comparisons to the movies, there is a Hitchockian ending I didn''t see coming (as one shouldn''t, Hitchcockian endings!). All in all, a brilliant novel I will add to my shelf of favorite books, alongside Memories of My Melancholy Whores and The Lover and I Look Divine and The Postman Always Rings Twice and Suicide and A Single Man .
Books to read again and again. Books to obsess over and devour." -- Elizabeth Ellen, author of Fast Machine "It is an engrossing read, perhaps because of what isn''t being said as much as all of the seemingly-extraneous detail that is being provided." -- Larry Nolen, The OF Blog "Jemc''s subtle touch is evident in the focus and attention of My Only Wife. The reader''s heart stirs and stops on her whim. This is a lovely, finely tuned book." -- Amelia Gray, author of Threats , Museum of the Weird , and AM/PM "Jac Jemc''s My Only Wife operates with the calm, pristine clarity of an enormous marble room. In moving, methodically arranged sentences, one comes across the surpassing surfaces and relics of a kind of intimacy that seems an increasingly difficult proposition to rightly preserve.
At last, here is a novel concerned with timeless dedication, love, and respect, which phrased through Jac Jemc''s steady warming eye needs no punchline or coincidence or cataclysm to give true glow to the glow itself." -- Blake Butler, author of There Is No Year and Nothing: A Portrait "I adored this book. I adored the slippery, enigmatic wife of the title and I adored her adoring husband and I adored every lovely, heartbreaking sentence in this deftly written, beautiful book. " -- Elizabeth Crane, author of When the Messenger is Hot and We Only Know So Much "This slim volume of achingly blunt and idiosyncratic stories will leave you wondering why everyone isn''t buzzing about Jemc already." -- O: The Oprah Magazine "Poignant, disturbing stories." -- Chicago Magazine "Jemc is a writer you read when you want to feel like there are possibilities in language and in life that you never even dreamed could be possible." --Lindsay Hunter, The Chicago Reader "Jemc is a keen craftsman. Her plots meander artfully and her characters intrigue.
" --Victoria Zhuang, The Harvard Crimson "Unless you''re a connoisseur of small literary magazines, you won''t just stumble across any stories by Jac Jemc, a Chicagoan who''s also the author of the 2013 novel My Only Wife . And that''s a damned shame. "--Aimee Levitt, The Chicago Reader "This is a collection that''s hard to read in a sitting. I found that the punches of each story, and so many stories in succession, were almost too much to take in in at once. Jemc''s stories are rough. Unapologetic. And they''re not easy or transparent. But read in doses, they reveal something about not just the characters, but how we as readers want to read character in a story.
What''s comfortable for us as readers? Why might an author want to shake that foundation? How can an author push language to be more complex? Jemc presents something hyper-ordinary in A Different Bed Every Time." --Heather Partington, The Rumpus "A lot of gauntlet-throwing for a slim book, but its provocations are worth meeting halfway."-- Kirkus "Jac Jemc is a writer to be reckoned with.A challenging collection of very short stories filled with sparkling language about self-conscious characters trying to balance on the edges."--Bruce Jacobs, Shelf Awareness "Jemc''s stories are, on the whole, somber, her characters dispirited and constrained by a world unable to understand them. It is the prose--in the playful and poetic approach to language and form--that gives these stories light." -- Publishers Weekly "In their brevity, the tales deliver wit and punch, and Jemc crafts pitch-perfect metaphors over and over." --Diego Bez, Booklist "An emotional, catastrophe-strewn story collection.
" --Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune "Simultaneously bizarre and enchanting -- and, at times, unsettling -- Jemc''s stories are literary crumbs to be savored slowly, bit by bit; delicious yet incomplete puzzles certain to leave a taste that lingers long after your eyes have devoured the final sentence." --Morgan Ribera, Bustle "In the stories in A Different Bed Every Time , she delves into a series of lives, finding unexpected ways to illuminate connections between people in precise prose." --Tobias Carroll, Vol. 1 Brooklyn "I picture Jemc in her basement at a foot-powered grinding wheel pressing the tip of her pen to the stone, sparks flying off like tiny fireworks, until it''s sharp as an icepick. In what I''ve read so far in A Different Bed Every Time , the blade is well-honed. All traces of bloat have been carved away." --David Abrams, The Quivering Pen "When Jemc''s follow-up collection, A Different Bed Every Time, hits shelves, expect to encounter stories showcasing Jemc''s playful and poetic sensibility." --Michael Seidlinger, The Millions "There is a cold wisdom shining through the stories in Jac Jemc''s A Different Bed Every Time, a detached and wry intelligence that seems to let us watch from over its shoulder, smiling commiseratorially, but never quite telling us what it sees.
The stories we witness here are often surprising, sometimes surreal, and frequently heartbreakin.