A Different Bed Every Time

August 11, 2014
Jemc follows her debut novel, My Only Wife, with a collection of short stories of loss and heartache. Many of the vignettes span only a few pages; they’re less stories than moments in time, with characters frozen in moments of nostalgia. In “The Dark Spot,” a woman has returned home to visit her family and ponders an old Halloween mask she finds in the basement. In “Unaccounted,” a man is stuck in the moment he realizes his relationship is over, regretting the loss while knowing he’s better off without it. Jemc also provides some longer works in which her characters have more room to grow. In “Bent Back,” a young girl is reluctant to wear her back brace, not convinced her scoliosis is a problem that requires fixing. In “The Tackiness of Souls,” a young woman flirts with a colleague while battling a pessimism that no one else might share her clever worldview. 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.

August 15, 2014
An entertaining, spiky batch of experimental fiction concerned with the disconnect among siblings, lovers and parents.The third book of fiction by Jemc (My Only Wife, 2012, etc.) comprises 42 short stories, some only a paragraph long, and with each she seems determined to upend received wisdom about how a story ought to be structured. "Marbles Loosed" is a brief recollection of a girl who's bounced around foster homes, but there's no forward motion to the narrative; its energy is in its wordplay, with provocative lines like, "people told me I had pearl eyes. I'd rub my sandy fingers in them, sure that was the only way to keep them smooth and beautiful." "The Wrong Sister" is a harrowing tale about a woman who trades places with her sister, whose husband turns murderous. In "More Mysteries," a woman minds her addict brother in an ICU but struggles to keep her grasp over him. Jemc's abstract, metaphorical language can make her stories demanding, sometimes frustrating. But her command is consistent, as is the somber tone that infuses each of these stories despite their wild wordplay-something serious is at stake for each of the (usually female) protagonists. That's clearer in the longer, more conventional pieces, such as "Bent Back," in which a teenage girl with scoliosis grows more distant from her older artist sister, even while her oeuvre largely consists of paintings of the girl's warped body. Similarly, in "Filch and Rot," two teenage girls rise from petty thievery of lipstick to become more ambitious criminals; "[a]ll those manners and ethics were being pulled loose of us like too many bones," Jemc writes. Here, as elsewhere, she argues that we only truly come alive when our bodies and minds misbehave. A lot of gauntlet-throwing for a slim book, but its provocations are worth meeting halfway.

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October 1, 2014
In her impeccable first novel, My Only Wife (2012), Jemc introduced readers to remarkable characters rendered in smart and poetic prose. This book of more than 40 stories, many only a few pages long, affirms the author's gift for unforgettable storytelling. In their brevity, the tales deliver wit and punch, and Jemc crafts pitch-perfect metaphors over and over. Home for Thanksgiving, one narrator feels like the dim spot on a fluorescent sign, with family buzzing around the fringes. An enigmatic, knife-throwing narrator talks a couple through an ominous exercise, each word a surfacing fin. A prisoner's eyes get all yogurty and wet when his daughter pays a visit. Jemc explores the deep treads of familial relationships with the same verve as she invents magical, fantastic figures like twin giants Bittern and Barn Swallow, the monstrous Scissortail, and the puzzling, frustrating Odette. These are stories of sisters, lovers, solitary beings, and wandering souls. Jemc combines and transforms the weirdness of Blake Butler with the allegorical impulses of Donald Barthelme via her delightfully challenging, idiosyncratic command of language.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)