Photo: Sharona Jacobs
I Felt My Life With Both My Hands
a story collection, April 2026
"In this moving, thoughtful and heartfelt collection, ordinary people and ordinary encounters yield extraordinary moments of insight and inspiration. What a lovely, loving book! Highly recommended." —Gish Jen, author of Bad Bad Girl
"The women who narrate the remarkable stories in Jessica Treadway's I Felt My Life with Both My Hands find the same kinds of hopes and sorrows filling and emptying their hearts—overtaking or abandoning them with power so startling but so intimately familiar that we recognize on every page our own sense of how often we are strangers most of all to ourselves."
—Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize award for Tinkers
New stories including "An Early Departure" from The Best American Short Stories 2025 and others published in Five Points, LitMag, New England Review, Colorado Review, Hong Kong Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Mount Hope Magazine, The MacGuffin, and Subnivean.
"Treadway's stories reveal a writer with an unsparing bent for the truth." —The New York Times Book Review