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. Jemc’s stories bear very little resemblance to the early-20th-century classics you may remember studying in junior high in preparation for the greater challenges of the novel, with their tidy situation-conflict-climax/epiphany-denouement structure and neatly isolated literary elements. (Can you identify the paradox at the end of O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi”?)
Some of Jemc’s experiments don’t work—alternating between male and female pronouns for the main character in “Judgment Day,” for example, is interesting in theory, annoying in practice—but she succeeds much more often than she fails. At her very best, she hits on emotional truths from unexpected angles, setting them down with a poet’s economy so that they resonate long after the story is over:
by Jac Jemc (Dzanc Books)
Reading Fri 11/7, 7:30 PM Women & Children First 5233 N. Clark 773-769-9299 womenandchildrenfirst.com Free
