A Floating Life

This novel of "magic realism, blended with quirky, surreal humor...should appeal to readers with a taste for the literary and the strange."—Booklist

In A Floating Life, a novel "in the lineage of Borges, Castañeda, and Philip K. Dick" (Kenneth Goldsmith), a nameless narrator who has reached a certain age is not quite consigned to leaving his youthful illusions behind. In fact, his reality is starting feel a little fractured. Following a harrowing job interview in a steam room, he finds himself at a party with a complete stranger who happens to be his wife. Soon, he is threatened by a litigious dachshund, and finds himself occupying the penthouse of a building buried underground and saddled with a stubborn case of erectile dysfunction. In a world that seems held together by increasingly mercurial laws and elusive boundaries, he finds work in an out-of-the-way shop called The Floating World.

Here, an elderly Dutch model maker named Pecheur toils over model ships. And here, enlivened by Pecheur's dream to tame the destructive forces of nature, the narrator begins to find his bearings.

Written with ominous humor and fearless invention, this tale of a midlife crisis takes readers "through [a] fantastical saga...like Odysseus's voyage without homecoming, like Dante's tour without a guide or a Beatrice, Crawford's narrator recounts his amazing adventures in a mesmerizing diction of long-suffering cool"(Nelson W. Aldrich Jr.).