More Praise for A Floating Life

“Talking bears, talking dogs, time travel, and a midlife crisis: Tad Crawford’s brilliantly original and entertaining first novel, A Floating Life, brings South American magical realism to twenty-first-century America in a mesmerizing story of one man’s search through the realms of myth, history, and the human psyche to explore love, friendship, family ties, vocation, and, in the end, what it means to live in an ultimately mysterious universe.

“Tad Crawford is an utterly fearless writer who will and does go wherever his wonderfully anarchic imagination takes him.”

—Howard Frank Mosher, author of A Stranger in the Kingdom

“By turns charming and ominous, whimsical and philosophical, A Floating Life is a multilayered, shape-shifting miracle of a first novel.”

—Melvin Jules Bukiet, author of Strange Fire and coauthor of Naked Came the Post-Postmodernist

“Throughout this fantastical saga of privation, like Odysseus’s voyage without a 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.

“His losses are nearly total: spouse, child, occupation, property, potency, clothes (repeatedly), safety, and friends. In the end, in his memory and ours, we are left an account of magical encounters with imaginary creatures: a litigious dachshund, a terrifyingly helpful bear, a man called Pecheur who doesn’t fish (men or fish). They cannot save him—often, indeed, they imperil him—but they can enchant our world. They did mine.”

—Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., author of Old Money

“A haunting, unusual, sui generis, and wonderfully sustained novel that also manages to be hilarious. I loved it.”

—Nick Lyons, author of Spring Creek

“Equal parts science fiction, magic realism, and hard-boiled detective story, A Floating Life is a dizzying journey through a fragmented landscape of ideas deftly rendered into a seamless, spellbinding narrative.

“Juggling the humorous, absurd, and stunningly profound, Crawford pulls off a nearly impossible feat: penning a page-turner that isn’t afraid to show its smarts.”

—Kenneth Goldsmith, author of Uncreative Writing