Floating Islands (Paperback)
Language: English
Published by Invisible Publishing, 2026
- Softcover
- New
Seller: Grand Eagle Retail, Bensenville, IL, U.S.A.Grand Eagle Retail
AbeBooks seller since October 12, 2005
Condition: New
£ 15.53
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Add to basketItem description from seller
Paperback. 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. Mansours 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 Mansours 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. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…
Seller Inventory # 9781778430916
- Title
- Floating Islands (Paperback)
- Author
- Joyce Mansour
- Publisher
- Invisible Publishing
- Publication year
- 2026
- Condition
- new
- Binding
- Paperback
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 1778430910
- ISBN 13
- 9781778430916
Three works that bookend Joyce Mansour’s two decades of published fiction
“Floating Islands” is Joyce Mansour’s most personal and unsettling work of prose. Set almost entirely within a hospital in Geneva, this work chronicles the slow collapse of boundaries between visitor and patient, authority and submission, imagination and extinction. What begins as an act of filial duty becomes an existential entrapment, as the narrator is absorbed into the institution’s rhythms and hierarchies.
Doctors and nurses embody a cruel vitality, their health weaponized against the dying. Patients drift through states of dependency, hallucination, and rage. Bodies leak, fail, and betray their owners, while language splinters under the pressure of describing what polite discourse refuses to name. The hospital is a place for arrivals and departures, and it is where Mansour stages her own farewell: “Floating Islands,” her final work of narrative prose, marks an important shift in her creative life in which she begins to look outward, rather than inward, for inspiration.
Rooted in Surrealism yet strikingly contemporary, “Floating Islands” (1973) is collected here alongside Mansour’s earliest prose works, “Julius Caesar” (1955) and “The Parrot” (1956), a combination that reads as both culmination and reckoning: a final confrontation with mortality, authorship, and the limits of imagination.
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About the Author
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. After marrying a Francophone Egyptian, she learned to write in French and was forced into exile in Paris following the rise of Nasser. 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.
Emilie Moorhouse is a multidisciplinary writer, translator, and lecturer based in Montréal, Canada. Her previous translations include Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour (City Lights Books, 2023), which was longlisted for the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia.
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Grand Eagle Retail
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AbeBooks seller since October 12, 2005
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