Reviewers' comments on Not a Chance

"Jessica Treat's elegant, unobtrusively surreal stories offer mysterious pleasures, as if the reader had com to an unknown land only to discover that he had been here in wonder before in some provocative unremembered dream."      - Jonathan Baumbach
 

"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

"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 world as invented by Jessica Treat's characters is wholly dependent on imagination to even exist.  It's a reading experience that's 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

"Frequently impressive.... Not a Chance is a provocative and daring volume that both offers and demands much."                                                                                                                  -James Polk, "The Country and Abroad"
 

Reviewers' comments on A Robber in the House

Los Angeles Reader's Monthly: "Treat... is a real find - a writer of spare, elliptical sentences, and disturbing mini-narratives that are as memorable for their implications as for what they say."
 

Booklist: Treat..."tells relationship stories - mostly of men and women, but also of daughters and mothers - that are funny or sad or malevolent; they are always diverting."
 

Minneapolis Star Tribune: "There is a joy in reading [A Robber in the House], the joy of experiencing superb writing by an artist who builds suspense and tension word by word..."
 

American Book Review: "Jessica Treat, described as a 'new' author, is really a very polished one, having worked for years in the short-short genre, publishing in diverse journals... There is a generosity behind the voice in these tales, along with a wonderful attention to detail."
 

Cimarron Review: "A dazzling display of economy and craft... these imposing and original pieces, from the bizarre fable to the flatly-surfaced puzzles, are the "takes" of our real lives..."
 

Studies in Short Fiction: "Treat's stories are a seamless blend of format, language, and subject; the short-short seems the natural genre for her writing talent.... Although dark and introspective, these short-shorts are absolutely accessible, with a refreshing clarity of language. "
 

The Women's Times: "Treat is a relentless stalker of moments. She fixes on the quiet but significant openings that certain moments provide us to see into ourselves and others, and then zeroes in on them with a ruthless precision."
 

Jonathan Baumbach: "Virtually no one does the short-short story with more precision and narrative power than Jessica Treat...This is a genuine discovery, the work of a new writer who uses words as if the language itself were her private invention."

Mary Gaitskill: "Rigorous and sensual, dream-like and resolutely cerebral, these stories are wry magic."