Floating Islands

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.