On a remote island in the Aegean, a billionaire named Morel is building a refuge for the super-rich from the chaos consuming the outside world. When a struggling journalist is hired to work on the spectacular exhibition that will inaugurate this exclusive new utopia, he jumps at the chance to restart a career that stopped with the death of his wife. Yet he comes to suspect that beneath the dazzling surface of this collaboration between art and power run currents of real violence. As the inauguration of the Floating World approaches, he finds it more difficult to distinguish dream from reality. Who is excluded from this paradise? On what traumas is it being constructed, and are they poised to return? And can art redeem us from the death of our loved ones and the end of the world? The Floating World is a dystopia, satire and Bildungsroman, steeped in ancient mythology and contemporary politics, a deeply moving, often hilarious and beautifully written debut novel that heralds the arrival of a major new talent in contemporary fiction.
Ben Eastham is editor-in-chief of e-flux Criticism and a widely published writer on contemporary art. The editor of books on Luis Camnitzer, Arshile Gorky, Fabio Mauri and Stephen Spender, he has worked on international exhibitions including the Shanghai Biennale, Documenta and Seoul Mediacity Biennale, and is on the advisory panel of EVA International. Now based in London, he has lived in Athens and Rome, was previously an editor at ArtReview and a founding editor of The White Review, and began his career at the BBC reporting on global mass media and propaganda. His previous book, The Imaginary Museum (TLS Books, 2020), is about how works of art reconstruct our experience of the world.
Ben Eastham said: ‘My goal with The Floating World was to explore what happens to us when our worlds fall apart, and how we might rebuild them. After the death of his wife, and in the midst of accelerating social and environmental crises, its ambiguously naïve or self-deceiving narrator must decide whether to take refuge from the end of those worlds in fantasy, or to make a life among the ruins. It has long been a dream of mine to publish this novel with Fitzcarraldo Editions, and I’m thrilled to work with the wonderful team at Astra House to bring this to readers in the US. I hope that this novel will speak to anyone who has, for whatever reason, felt the foundations of their reality wobble.’
Publisher Jacques Testard added: ‘After many years of working together on The White Review, I am very excited to be publishing Ben Eastham’s debut novel The Floating World with Fitzcarraldo Editions. It is an excellent work of fiction about grief, late capitalism and the imminent climate apocalypse set on a Greek island in the not-too distant future. It is compulsively readable, both very funny and deeply moving, and Ben’s sentences are exceptional. It’s a thrilling repurposing of Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel for the twenty-first century, and I’m excited for it to be out in the world this autumn.’
Astra House editors Tara Sharma and Patrizia van Daalen join in to say: ‘We are delighted to collaborate again with the excellent team at Fitzcarraldo to bring a luminous new voice to US readers. Beneath a giant geodesic dome unfolds a deeply affecting story of love and loss, ecological collapse, the art world and its artifices, and techno-utopianism. Ben Eastham’s prose is fluid and magnetic, keen and crystalline, and he has built a propulsive allegory that probes our most contemporary moral anxieties. The Floating World is a defiant embrace of art and its revolutionary potential, as well a kaleidoscopic and highly attuned inquiry into grief and its mysterious logic. We are incredibly excited for readers to encounter this extraordinary work.’