Floating Islands

by Joyce Mansour, Emilie Moorhouse (Translator)

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.

Paperback

Published September 22, 2026

About the author

Joyce Mansour was born Joyce Patricia Adès in Bowden, England to Jewish-Egyptian parents. After a month in Cheshire her parents returned with her to Cairo where she lived until she was twenty. Moving to Paris in 1953 she became one of the best known Surrealist poets, authoring sixteen books of poetry, as well as a number of important prose and theater pieces.

Reviews

[Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv)]

The type of modernist, experimental fiction that just doesn't compute for my brain. Each sentence is a surprise, and there is no sense of linearity within any of the three entries. I enjoyed the commentary about misogyny and Mansour's fragmented, abstract take on reality — but I fear I understood maybe 10% of this. The book includes footnotes for the plethora of historical figures and literary references, which is appreciated, but the sheer number of them makes for an unsatisfactory reading experience if you're a reader like me with limited context. It seems unfair to assign this a rating (or even give it a comprehensive review) — just not a book for me, but don't let that dissaude you.

Thank you to the publisher for the copy!