Maud Casey

Research Expertise
Creative Writing
Maud Casey is the author of three novels, The Shape of Things to Come, Genealogy, The Man Who Walked Away; a collection of stories, Drastic; and a book of nonfiction,The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions. She is the recipient of the Calvino Prize, a DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2015 St. Francis College Literary Prize, and numerous international fellowships including, most recently, the BAU Institute at Camargo Summer Arts Residency Fellowship and a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship. Her stories have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, The American Scholar, The Normal School, Forklift, Ohio, Bellevue Literary Journal, and American Fiction. Her book reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Literary Imagination, Salon, A Public Space, and Post Road. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Publications
The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions
The fourteenth volume in the Art of series conjures an ethereal subject: the idea of mystery in fiction.
English
Lead: Maud CaseyThe Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions
The fourteenth volume in the Art of series conjures an ethereal subject: the idea of mystery in fiction.
English | Center for Literary and Comparative Studies
Lead: Maud CaseyThe Man Who Walked Away: A Novel
In a trance-like state, Albert walks—from Bordeaux to Poitiers, from Chaumont to Macon, and farther afield to Turkey, Austria, Russia—all over Europe.
English
Lead: Maud CaseyThe Man Who Walked Away: A Novel
In a trance-like state, Albert walks—from Bordeaux to Poitiers, from Chaumont to Macon, and farther afield to Turkey, Austria, Russia—all over Europe.
English
Lead: Maud CaseyIn a trance-like state, Albert walks—from Bordeaux to Poitiers, from Chaumont to Macon, and farther afield to Turkey, Austria, Russia—all over Europe. When he walks, he is called a vagrant, a mad man. He is chased out of towns and villages, ridiculed and imprisoned. When the reverie of his walking ends, he’s left wondering where he is, with no memory of how he got there. His past exists only in fleeting images.
Loosely based on the case history of Albert Dadas, a psychiatric patient in the hospital of St. André in Bordeaux in the nineteenth century, The Man Who Walked Away imagines Albert’s wanderings and the anguish that caused him to seek treatment with a doctor who would create a diagnosis for him, a narrative for his pain.
In a time when mental health diagnosis is still as much art as science, Maud Casey takes us back to its tentative beginnings and offers us an intimate relationship between one doctor and his patient as, together, they attempt to reassemble a lost life. Through Albert she gives us a portrait of a man untethered from place and time who, in spite of himself, kept setting out, again and again, in search of wonder and astonishment.
Genealogy
Meet the Hennarts: Samantha Hennart, a poet with writer's block; her husband, Bernard, obsessed with the life of a nineteenth-century Belgian mystic with stigmata.
English
Lead: Maud CaseyGenealogy
Meet the Hennarts: Samantha, a poet with writer's block; her husband, Bernard, obsessed with the life of a 19th-century Belgian mystic with stigmata; their son, Ryan, a mediocre rock musician; & their daughter, Marguerite, who is quietly losing her mind.
English
Lead: Maud CaseyMeet the Hennarts: Samantha Hennart, a poet with writer's block; her husband, Bernard, obsessed with the life of a nineteenth-century Belgian mystic with stigmata; their son, Ryan, a mediocre rock musician; and their eighteen-year old daughter, Marguerite, who is quetly losing her mind. A meditation on family, faith, and mental illness, Genealogy is an operatic story of one family's unraveling and ultimate redemption. An Editor's Choice selection for the New York Times Book Review.
Drastic
These simple gestures of optimism and vitality, gorgeously rendered, make Drastic an unforgettable collection.
English
Lead: Maud CaseyThese simple gestures of optimism and vitality, gorgeously rendered, make Drastic an unforgettable collection. Meet the college graduate working in a whole-body donation clinic; a young woman obsessed with Benedictine monks; a middle-aged woman who becomes a stand-in talk-show guest; unlikely friends who meet in a domestic violence shelter; a young girl and the father who stole her away to escape his wife's mental illness; a graduate student from a suburban family who believes her physical connection to the world is deteriorating. Casey explores how we survive modern crises of loss and love through the lives of emotional and geographic nomads. Each flirts with madness and self-destruction while reaching toward life.
Drastic
Meet the college graduate working in a whole body-donation clinic; a young woman obsessed with Benedictine monks; a middle-aged woman who becomes a stand-in talk-show guest; unlikely friends who meet in a domestic violence shelter.
English
Lead: Maud CaseyThe Shape of Things to Come
Isabelle, a woman in her thirties without any of the trappings of a "grown-up" life, has just been fired from her job at a San Francisco phone company.
English
Lead: Maud CaseyThe Shape of Things to Come
Isabelle, a woman in her thirties without any of the trappings of a grown-up life, has just been fired from her job at a San Francisco phone company.
English
Lead: Maud CaseyIsabelle, a woman in her thirties without any of the trappings of a grown-up life, has just been fired from her job at a San Francisco phone company. Returning to the midwestern suburb of her childhood, Standardsville, Illinois, she contends with her dating single mother, a neighbor who onced appeared on The Honeymooners, and an ex-boyfriend. She also become a mystery shopper for a temp agency, posing as a variety of potential tenants for newly built suburban communities to access their exclusive services. Enchanted by the possibilities of disguise, Isabelle spins a web of lies that keeps the world at a distance until she unearths long-kept secrets that force her to rethink everything she thought she knew.
Service & Outreach
Guggenheim Fellowship
University of Maryland English Professor Maud Casey is a recipient of a 2015 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
English
Lead: Maud CaseyDC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowship
D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowship.
English
Lead: Maud Casey