A Different Bed Every Time - Softcover

Jac Jemc lives in Chicago, where she writes fiction and poetry. Her first novel, My Only Wife (Dzanc Books) was a named a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award. A chapbook of stories, This Stranger She'd Invited In, sold out at Greying Ghost Press in March 2011. Jac received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has completed residencies at Ragdale and the Vermont Studio Center. She is a web fiction editor for Hobart and poetry editor at decomP.

Praise for A Different Bed Every Time:

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, The Isle of Youth

"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, author of Silence Once Begun

"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, author of Don't Kiss Me, and Ugly Girls

"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 Review

"A lot of gauntlet-throwing for a slim book, but its provocations are worth meeting halfway." Kirkus Reviews

"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

"An emotional, catastrophe-strewn story collection." Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune

"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 heartbreaking, but they are all united by the singular confidence of Jemc’s style assured, controlled, and clean." Emily Kiernan, Heavy Feather Review
Praise for My Only Wife:

"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.com

"Jac Jemc has written a novel so wonderful that if it were a dish served at a social event, I would ask the hostess for the recipe." NewPages.com

Jac Lemc's novel My Only Wife is a brilliant, haunting, and heartbreaking debut that explores themes of loss and love.” Large Hearted Boy

The author sculpts her characters to reveal their bare form, which just happens to include their innermost flaws. She impressively closes the gap between objects and affects, emotion and experience, exactly what any attempt at accurately portraying our world requires.” Smalldoggies Magazine

A book whose sentences have become textures in my memory that I will keep with me.” Jess Stoner

Jemc has done something quite extraordinary with her first novel. She has created a world that is at once familiar and at once strange. Just as the husband can never quite get close enough to his wife, the reader can never quite grasp where Jemc is taking her characters on their journey.” Used Furniture Review

In My Only Wife, Jac Jemc takes the noir and beauty and eternity of what we think is love and creates an entirely new narrative.” The Nervous Breakdown

I don’t necessarily like the people in this book, but I understand these people and I love this book. And absolute pleasure to read, and I will cherish it on my bookshelf. I don’t often reread novels, but this is definitely one I’ll return to again and again.” Samuel Snoek-Brown

Jac Jemc paints a devastating picture of what happens to the one who gets left behind in her debut novel My Only Wife.” The Next Best Book Blog

End of the year Top Ten list at Volume I Brooklyn.

Finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award for debut fiction