Floating Islands 9781778430916 Paperback

Three works that bookend Joyce Mansours two decades of published fictionFloating Islands is Joyce Mansours 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 institutions 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 Mansours 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.