Satisfied Sarcophagi: Collected Short Stories

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."

Joyce Mansour was born in England in 1928 to a Jewish family of Syrian descent who moved to Egypt when she was still an infant. She grew up among the English-speaking elite of Egypt. Despite her privileged childhood, she was deeply scarred by the loss of her mother to cancer at 15 years old and the death of her first husband six months into their marriage, when she was just 18. She learned to speak and write in French when she married her second husband, a Francophone Egyptian, and was exiled to Paris when Nasser came to power. Mansour was part of the inner circle of Surrealists, a close friend of André Breton and the most significant poet to join the group after World War II. She wrote 16 books of poetry, as well as prose works and plays. She lived in Paris, France until her death in 1986 at age of 58.

C. Francis Fisher is a poet and translator. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Yale Review, The New England Review, and The Adroit Journal among others. Her first book of translations, In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour, appeared with World Poetry Books in 2024. She has been supported by fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. She lives in Queens, New York.

Garrett Caples has published four full-length poetry collections, most recently Lovers of Today (2021), a book of essays, Retrievals (2014), and a book of stories, Proses (2024). He's an editor at City Lights, where his titles include Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems by Joyce Mansour (2023). He lives in San Francisco, CA.