City of Incurable Women (Paperback)

City of Incurable Women By Maud Casey Cover Image

City of Incurable Women (Paperback)

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In a fusion of fact and fiction, nineteenth-century women institutionalized as hysterics reveal what history ignored

"City of Incurable Women is a brilliant exploration of the type of female bodily and psychic pain once commonly diagnosed as hysteria--and the curiously hysterical response to it commonly exhibited by medical men. It is a novel of powerful originality, riveting historical interest, and haunting lyrical beauty." --Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through

"Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?" wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history's ghosts, marginalized and dispossessed due to their gender and class, they are reimagined by Maud Casey as complex, flesh-and-blood people with stories to tell. 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 Salp tri re hospital and reduced to specimens for study by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues.

Maud Casey is the author of five books of fiction, including City of Incurable Women, and a work of nonfiction, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions. A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the St. Francis College Literary Prize, she teaches at the University of Maryland and lives in Washington, DC.
Product Details ISBN: 9781942658863
ISBN-10: 1942658869
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Publication Date: February 22nd, 2022
Pages: 128
Language: English

Advance Praise for City of Incurable Women

“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 and Margaret the First

City of Incurable Women is a brilliant exploration of the type of female bodily and psychic pain once commonly diagnosed as hysteria—and the curiously hysterical response to it commonly exhibited by medical men. It is a novel of powerful originality, riveting historical interest, and haunting lyrical beauty.” —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through

“I would follow Maud Casey anywhere. In City of Incurable Women, she has given us her best work yet. This is a song for the forgotten, full of voices that will stay with you and guide you—an astonishing portrayal of rage and hope. What a glorious work of art and what a true gift to us.” —Paul Yoon, author of Snow Hunters and Run Me to Earth

Select Praise for Maud Casey

“Casey is a consummate stylist. . . . This is a writer who pays deep, sensual attention to the world.” ―Geraldine Brooks, New York Times Book Review

“Brilliant.” —Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies and Florida

“Wildly original.” —Joan Silber, author of Ideas of Heaven and Improvement

“[A] compassionate, joyful, lyrical voice.” —George Saunders, author of Lincoln In the Bardo and Fox 8

“Deeply empathetic and rigorously intelligent.” —Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon

“A rich and wonderfully unpredictable talent.” —John Searles, author of Strange But True and Help for the Haunted

“Casey writes so evocatively about family love, loss, and madness that she can break your heart.” —Julia Glass, author of Three Junes and A House Among the Trees

“Like Eudora Welty, Maud Casey aims her considerable art at such nearly unsayable recognitions.” —Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago and Paper Lantern

“Casey writes the way Elizabeth Bowen might if she lived here, and now.” —Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and Archangel

Listen. It’s a command that Maud Casey’s quick to utter. . . . With good reason: If you’re listening closely enough, you might just hear her pull off a feat as graceful as it is clever. Out of the clanging of church bells, the ticking of watches, the snatches of overheard phrases . . . out of this hectic mess of sounds, she manages to create a delicate harmony.” —NPR

“Casey evokes—with no shortage of verve and gusto—the romance of 19th-century Europe, when madness plagued more than asylums . . . bringing each internee, each insanity alive with such tenderness.” —Washington Post

“A sensitive and courageous chronicler. . . . [Casey’s lines] absolutely soar with illuminating little details that crack everything open and reach for hope.” —Hartford Courant

“[Casey] shows us not just the origins of psychological conditions, but the language to describe them as well.” —Rumpus