Three works that bookend Joyce Mansour’s two decades of published fiction, including the first English translation of “Floating Islands”

“Floating Islands” is Joyce Mansour’s most personal and unsettling work of prose. Set almost entirely within a hospital in Geneva, it 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. Hospitals are also places for arrivals and departures, and it is where Mansour stages her own farewell: “Floating Islands” is her final work of narrative prose, one that marks an important shift in the author’s creative life, and where the source of her inspiration moves from looking inward to one looking outward.

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), reading as both culmination and reckoning: a final confrontation with mortality, authorship, and the limits of imagination.