Satisfied Sarcophagi
Collected Short Stories
Joyce Mansour author Garrett Caples editor C Francis Fisher editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:City Lights Books
Publishing:17th Sep '26
£12.99
This title is due to be published on 17th September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
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 Books
Egyptian 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."
"Powerful, transgressive, and obscene, Mansour's stories spin an elaborate dance between death and sex, disemboweling the patriarchy (and every other authority figure) in the process. These stories, though written decades ago, are still beautifully unsettling today. This is the path surrealist prose could have taken, if it hadn't balked."—Brian Evenson, author of Last Days
"Vividly translated by C. Francis Fischer, Joyce Mansour's prose is erotic, funny, scary, intensive, and grotesque, sometimes all at once. It follows the inclinations of a mind operating in utter inventiveness. Every sentence is unpredictable, every image startling. This must be why there has been such an explosion of interest in her work—as in the work of fellow woman surrealist Leonora Carrington. In extreme times, we need extreme measures, convulsive beauty."—Johannes Göransson, author of The New Quarantine
"The new English translation published by City Lights Books of one of her idiosyncratic masterpieces, Satisfied Sarcophagi, once again rightfully draws our rapt attention not only to the often quieter and less recognized place of women amongst the surrealist canon, but also to the writer who I place at the apex of that pantheon. . . . the quintessential literary provocateur and the most daring of all surrealist authors: Joyce Mansour."—Donald Brackett, Critics At Large
"Only recently did English find out that Joyce Mansour was one of the 20th century's most uncanny and transformative poets, and now comes the revelation that she was also quite the raconteur. Her narrations feel both enigmatic and fated—each word, each image, lashed to the next by libidinous and mortal sinew. C. Francis Fisher's translation is limpid and fragrant, like a vapor rising over a cauldron of boiling blood. I suspect this collection will soon be recognized as a classic of Modernist fiction—in the Surrealist tradition and beyond. May it be read widely."—Kit Schluter, author of Cartoons
ISBN: 9780872869202
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
180 pages