Not a Chance: Fictions
Description
Ranging in location from St. Germain and Mexico City to a coldly bucolic New England, these individually wrapped dreams record the struggle of contemporary consciousness for placement and connection. Treat’s narrators--American, female, mostly single--are cultural refugees given to obsession and passionate longing. In the complex title story, a woman attempts to imagine her friend’s love affair, succeeding with such vividness that woman and friend begin to merge. In “Radio Disturbance” a character gradually becomes so attached to her therapist’s voice that she insinuates herself into the woman’s home. These are haunting, intricately textured fictions that will lift you high above familiar ground.
Praise for Not a Chance: Fictions
“Jessica Treat’s elegant, unobtrusively surreal stories offer mysterious pleasures, as if the reader had come to an unknown land only to discover that he had been here in wonder before in some provocative unremembered dream.”—Jonathan Baumbach
“Jessica Treat is a sly and subtle stylist, with an uncanny ability to view the world from inside a character’s skin. Alternately funny and deeply disturbing, these finely crafted stories reveal Treat’s compassionate vision of the alienated soul, at once comic, strange, and frighteningly familiar.”—Rilla Askew
“The directness and simplicity of Treat’s tone is so unassuming, it is forcibly intimate. Her manner may be quiet but it is unabashed, and it overtakes the reader, as if by stealth. An original, remarkable work.”—Irini Spanidou
