Infinite Dimensions

In Infinite Dimesions, her first collection after winning the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction for Please Come Back to Me, Jessica Treadway writes about the themes of fidelity, betrayal, and self-delusion as she portrays what William Faulkner called “the human heart in conflict with itself.” Following in the tradition of Elizabeth Strout and her own mentor, the late Andre Dubus, Treadway mines the internal landscapes of her characters with intimate insight as she shows them trying but often failing to live up to their own moral standards. A female bank executive with a history of psychiatric illness is forced to decide whether to hire her former hospital roommate, whom she fears will expose her past. A college student has to choose between his grandmother and his girlfriend. A recovering alcoholic faces the prospect of self-sabotage during a dinner meeting with an editor who can make or break her career. The stories are loosely linked by character, setting, and the motif of a talking sugar bowl that appears in the work of the Russian author Anya Chaykovskaya who is, in turn, one of Treadway’s own fictional characters. Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as “a writer with an unsparing bent for the truth,” Treadway exhibits in her stories both a deft understanding of human psychology and mastery at depicting it in multiple, complex, and intriguing forms.