Satisfied Sarcophagi

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 Andre 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 a (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."