“In exquisite prose, Maud Casey has built a city inside a book, a city that is a hospital, a museum, a dance, a body in ecstasy just outside the frame. On every page of this achingly beautiful book, Casey brings a wise and feral attention to the so-called incurables of the ‘era of soul science’—Augustine, Louise, Marie, Geneviève, and a chorus of nameless others singing their private beginnings and public ends.”
—Danielle Dutton, author of SPRAWL

Long history’s ghosts, marginalized and dispossessed due to their gender and class, women diagnosed as hysterics are reimagined by Maud Casey as complex, flesh-and-blood people with stories to tell in CITY OF INCURABLE WOMEN. These linked, evocative prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and medical documents both authentic and invented, poignantly restore the humanity to the nineteenth-century female psychiatric patients confined in Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital and reduced to specimens for study by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues.

Maud Casey, a finalist for the American Library in Paris Book Award, and the Joyce Carol Oates Book Prize, is the author of four novels, a short story collection, and THE ART OF MYSTERY: THE SEARCH FOR QUESTIONS. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, Salon, Poets and Writers, A Public Space and Literary Imagination. She is the recipient of the Italo Calvino Prize, the St. Francis College Literary Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Maryland.

Casey visits UNL as part of the Creative Writing Program of the English Department.