Floating Islands gathers three key prose works by Joyce Mansour, a central yet still undertranslated figure of Surrealism whose writing confronts power, desire, and bodily dissolution with brutal clarity. Anchored by her final and most significant prose work, Floating Islands, the collection stages the hospital as a total institution: a sealed hierarchy where illness, authority, sexuality, and imagination concoct fevered realities.
A woman arrives as a visitor to her dying father and becomes, almost imperceptibly, a patient herself. Recurring figures circulate around her: doctors and nurses whose vitality sharpens their cruelty, fellow patients suspended between consciousness and decay, and fragments of the self that split, double, and erode. Mansour’s prose moves between memoir, dream, and philosophical meditation, exposing how institutions oppress bodies while gaslighting them into their notion of healing.
In addition to Floating Islands, this collection includes Mansour’s earliest prose experiments, the stories “Julius Cesar” and “The Parrot,” allowing readers to trace the evolution of her Surrealist method across decades. No longer cast aside as historical curiosities, these works position Mansour as a writer whose interrogation of authority, identity, and the unruly body speaks directly to contemporary feminist, experimental, and cross-genre literature.
Joyce Mansour (1928–1986) was born in England to a Jewish family of Syrian descent who moved to Egypt shortly after her birth, where she grew up among the English-speaking elite. Her early life was marked by profound loss, including the death of her mother from cancer when she was fifteen and the sudden death of her first husband only six months into their marriage. After marrying a Francophone Egyptian, she learned to write in French and was forced into exile in Paris following the rise of Nasser. There, Mansour became one of the most uncompromising figures of the postwar Surrealist movement and the most significant poet to join the group after World War II, a close friend of André Breton and part of the movement’s inner circle. She authored sixteen books of poetry as well as prose works and plays that confront desire, death, violence, and the female body with startling directness. Long marginalized due to the extremity of her work, Mansour is now recognized as a central figure in Surrealism’s later period, whose writing dismantles moral, erotic, and institutional power structures through formal dislocation, syntactic violence, and psychic intensity.
Emilie Moorhouse is a Canadian writer, translator, and environmentalist. Raised in a French-speaking household in Toronto, she earned an MFA from the University of British Columbia. Her English translation of
Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems by Joyce Mansour (City Lights, 2023) was longlisted for the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize and praised for capturing Mansour’s uncompromising exploration of desire, death, and identity.
