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A short story is presented.

Maud Casey’s prodigious imagination, down-the-rabbit-hole research, and poetic prose come together in a beautiful fusion of fact and fiction in her fourth novel, City of Incurable Women (Bellevue Literary, Feb. 2022). The setting for the story of late-19th-century women hysterics is Paris’s Salpêtrière Hospital, an asylum with a population of thousands at the time. Casey uses archival photos and documents to tell the stories of patients there who were studied and photographed under the direction of neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot.

The characters in Maud [Maud Casey]'s stories tend to teeter near breakdowns: They're in transition, working temp jobs, living indefinitely back at home, fighting self-destructive urges or finding reasons to live in the aftermath. Casey is a sensitive and courageous chronicler of their searches, and feels the landscape of the Southwest in her lungs. But it is the last lines of the stories in the Wesleyan graduate's new collection, \"Drastic\" (William Morrow, $23.95), that absolutely soar with the illuminating little details that crack everything open and reach for hope. In September, Casey starts as the writer-in-residence at the Gilman School, a Baltimore high school. She'll move with her novel- in-progress, \"Genealogy,\" which is based on one of the short stories in \"Drastic,\" and with a healthy book collection weighted these days toward British women writers of the '40s and '50s. Two favorites: Barbara Comyns' \"Sisters By a River\" and Christina Stead's \"The Man Who Loved Children,\" along with more contemporary writers like Paula Fox, James Salter and A.L. Kennedy.

Casey, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., is currently serving as visiting guest professor at IWU.

\"The Shape of Things to Come\" by Maude Casey is reviewed.