Joyce Mansour – författare

Rediscover Joyce Mansour, the most significant Surrealist poet to emerge from 1950s Paris.“You know very well, Joyce, that you are for me—and very objectively too—the greatest poet of our time. Surrealist poetry, that’s you.”—André Breton Joyce Mansour, a Syrian Jewish exile from Egypt, was 25 years old when she published her first book in Paris in 1953. Her fierce, macabre, erotically charged works caught the eye of André Breton, who welcomed her into his Surrealist group and became her lifelong friend and ally. Despite her success in surrealist circles, her books received scant attention from the literary establishment, which is hardly surprising since Mansour's favorite topics happened to be two of society's greatest fears: death and unfettered female desire.Now, over half a century later, Mansour's time has come. Emerald Wounds collects her most important work, spanning the entire arc of her career, from the gothic, minimalist fragments of her first published work to the serpentine power of her poems of the 1980s. In fresh new translations, Mansour's voice surges forth uncensored and raw, communicating the frustrations, anger, and sadness of an intelligent, worldly woman who defies the constraints and oppression of a male-dominated society. Mansour is a poet the world needs today.

Leonora Carrington meets Georges Bataille in these outlandish surrealist tales."Mansour saw in the erotic the possibilities for individual and collective freedom. Inside the void, a reimagining of the self and the world can occur, illuminating new ways to live that contrast with the default world of the everyday."—Ama Kwarteng, Los Angeles Review of BooksEgyptian exile Joyce Mansour was one of the most important writers to join André Breton's Paris Surrealist group after the Second World War. This exciting follow-up to City Lights' acclaimed selection of Mansour's poems (Emerald Wounds, 2023) is a milestone in the ongoing rediscovery of one of the most powerful voices of 20th-century Surrealism. Known during her lifetime primarily as a poet, Mansour also published a small but significant body of prose. Satisfied Sarcophagi collects her complete short stories, drawing from her two collections published in France, Les Gisantes Satisfaits (1958) and Ça (1970).Mansour portrays a universe of constant transformation and constant violence, weaving an eroticized surrealist texture from unsettling areas of the psyche, replete with Sadean excess, incestuous relations, and her usual complement of bodily fluids. In "Mary, or the Honor of Serving," the protagonist endures a series of grotesque events, deciding to remain with her murderous lover rather than escape to a banal bourgeois life. "Cancer" depicts a boy's obsession with an old woman's hump, which threatens to subsume her. "The Tip" and "Infinitely . . . on the Lawn" explore oedipal struggles, the one featuring a gender-switching protagonist caught between the family maid and his mother, the other a woman and her mother sharing the same lover. Other stories like "Dolman the Evil" and "Sunday Shakes" concern demonic beings of uncertain origin. With Satisfied Sarcophagi—brought into English by noted Mansour translator C. Francis Fisher—Joyce Mansour rightly claims her place as a take-no-prisoners bad-girl progenitor of a growing body of women's writing known in the 21st century as "fantastic/erotic horror."

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.