The Floating World

“A grieving idealist works on an art installation inside “a doomsday bunker for billionaires” in prominent art critic Eastham’s heady but rewarding first novel, which highlights the competing and conflicting interests of artists, societies, and corporations.”
—Cory Oldweiler, The Boston Globe

“If there is anyone well positioned to write satisfying fiction about contemporary art, it’s Ben Eastham . . . [his] debut novel, The Floating World, is at once a humorous send-up of this rarefied but often-mocked industry and a moving meditation on morality, grief, and the miracles that art may yet offer.”
—Chloe Hadavas, Foreign Policy

“I was fully beguiled by Eastham’s esoteric, magnetic debut . . . The novel is often very funny, but is also notable for its ability to unpack a specific kind of moral ambiguity that feels strikingly current (and also, as these things sometimes go, timeless), and not least because the derangement of the climate and our global order is backgrounded as an assumed reality.”
—Emily Temple, Lit Hub

“Set around a nefarious arms and apartheid-investing corporation’s creation of a utopian community under a geodesic dome on an Aegean Island, The Floating World asks whether one can — or more, should — draw a line of moral exemption in a world built upon exemptions from governmental, economic, and resource extraction regulations.”
—Phillip Pyle, Hyperallergic

“Written by e-flux’s Ben Eastham, this novel—like the art world—makes utopia and dystopia frighteningly difficult to tell apart.”
—Art in America

“Fascinating . . . Eastham, an art critic, demonstrates a consummate knowledge of the art world’s inner workings and its uneasy relationship with billionaire patrons . . . there’s much to admire in his striking vision.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A convincing portrait of a human-made paradise that isn’t free from the pressures and contradictions of the world outside.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“There are haunting passages on uncertainty, perception, and grief in this perceptive satirical account of how elites use art to present themselves as defenders of culture.”
—Adrienne Cruz, Booklist

“Elegant and blistering . . . this absurdist art-world satire comes with a bite.”
—Sam Franzini, Our Culture

“At times earnest and at times satirical beyond belief. Eastham offers an engaging story filled to the brim with emotion and absurdity. There’s so much to chew in these pages and readers are going to feast.”
—Debutiful

“Eastham’s agile, transporting prose is as alive to the magic and darkness of the world as it is to its absurdities . . . his fiction debut is an intriguing dystopian satire.”
—The Bookseller

“The world—that is, the protagonist—floats through opaque settings of fateful money, violent strangers and ghostly love; a tender, guilty work of wish-fulfillment and the most valuable kind of first novel, documenting the author’s struggle to reconcile right action with the egomaniac work of writing books.”
—Nell Zink, author of Sister Europe

“An immersing, crystalline debut novel that reaches out to a world in crisis;
elegant, emotional, deeply serious and gloriously witty.”
—Deborah Levy, author of August Blue

“Novels like this don’t come around very often. Ben Eastham’s The Floating World is transporting in every sense of the word. A meditation on the brutal and beautiful nexus where art and money meet, an odyssey of grief and discovery, a rallying cry against the people ruining the world from those that are trying to change it. It’s a towering achievement.”
—Dominic Amarena, author of I Want Everything

“An astute satire about the absurdities of the artworld, a compelling mystery and an elegy, The Floating World is unputdownable: frequently funny, often moving and always intriguing.”
—Jennifer Higgie, author of The Other Side

“Channeling Adolfo Bioy Casares, Eastham carries a vision of art’s complicity with power to its endgame. If Art Basel is now globalized, then so is Minneapolis. Looping civilization back to end where it began, in Athens, he proposes that the only counterforce to fascism is love.”
—Tom McCarthy, author of The Making of Incarnation

“Startlingly imaginative, The Floating World is at times like the work of a J. G. Ballard for the 2020s, at others like the reincarnation of Italo Calvino. Eastham is as deft with a finely observed comic riff as he is with a heart-stoppingly lovely description of a city, a gesture, a connection. In his hands, what could have been a satire of art-world hubris becomes something so attuned to the world—its wonder and its clear and present danger . . . I don’t want to sound mawkish, but ultimately it’s a novel about our boundless potential to connect, and what we should ultimately value.”
—Luke Kennard, author of Black Bag