Jessica Treat

"If short-story anthologies are feasts of appetizers, Treat serves up delicacies this time around. Not a Chance offers eight stories and one novella that may go down quickly, but should still be savored all the way to their slightly bitter aftertaste... Treat's tales describe mostly female characters who are not merely unhappy or wistful for love, but who nurse obsessions until their world becomes a delicate balance of fantasy and reality, fragile and distorted. Like the woman in the title story who imagines her best friend's affair so intensely she begins to inhabit it herself... Honda is Treat writing with a sharp-edged precision, letting her narrator descend gradually into delusion... Backdrops range from European cobblestone boulevards to bland American diners. Treat has an affinity for faraway locales, but the most exotic terrain remains inside the twisted perceptions of the characters themselves, clearly Treat's hallmark. As she continues to blend dark humor with darker obsessions, Treat may find herself in a unique position among current women writers: lighter than A.M. Holmes, darker than Lorrie Moore. Not a Chance shimmers with smart, poignant prose."
--Seth Taylor, San Diego Union Tribune


"The world as viewed by, or invented by Jessica Treat's characters is wholly dependent on imagination to even exist. It's a reading experience that's like our lives, and like surfing for the first time: carried so swiftly by a power outside yourself, you're alternately thinking wheeee and how did I get here!"
--Cris Mazza

"Jessica Treat's skill as a writer is to bring home the fact one forgets when reading lesser work. That writing can be a profound act of making self in order to move in and out of material existence with conscience. Where the ways we deceive ourselves are often both the means of self-entrapment and self-rescue."
--Lou Robinson