Following a harrowing job interview in a steam room, a nameless narrator leaves his youthful dreams behind, no longer certain who or what he is. He finds himself at a party talking to a woman he doesn’t know who proves to be his unsatisfied wife. Soon separated but still living in the same apartment, he is threatened by a litigious dachshund and saddled with a stubborn case of erectile dysfunction in a world that seems held together by increasingly mercurial laws and elusive boundaries— if not by the golden bars of a sub-basement apartment offered for rent.
His relationship deepens with an elderly Dutch model maker named Pecheur whose miniature boats are erratically offered for sale in a hard-to-find shop called The Floating World. Enlivened by Pecheur’s dream to tame the destructive forces of the ocean, the narrator begins to find his bearings.
With quiet humor and wisdom, A Floating Life charts its course among images that surprise and disorient. In this urban fantasy, bears cavort in caves in New York’s Central Park, a man can enjoy the pleasures of breast-feeding his own child, and WWII isn’t completely over for some.
A Floating Life is a rollicking, unforgettable, and inventive journey—and it is also a source of insight, solace, and inspiration. In the following video, the author discusses his novel.
Read an Excerpt or Request a Review Copy
Praise for A Floating Life:
“At times, Crawford seems to be channeling Kafka or Borges . . . Odd, offbeat, strangely shimmering.”
– KirkusReviews (full review here)
“His refreshing style brings surprise and fun back into fiction.”
– New York Journal of Books (full review here)
“I enjoyed this unusual book. It is strewn with symbolism – Jung would have had a field day. On writing this review I realise that I really ought to read it again to see what more I can find.”
– Zoe Brooks (full review on Brooks’s Magic Realism blog here)
“So artfully written that the world it creates makes sense.”
– Booklist
“I loved this novel through which, I suspect, I will discover more meaning in each rereading.”
– Dolce Bellezza
“If you like novels that make the unconscious visible, then you should really enjoy reading A Floating Life by Tad Crawford.”
– Analytical Psychology Club of New York Bulletin
“This hallucinatory first novel by Tad Crawford, sends its nameless middle-aged narrator on a surreal odyssey that will entrance lovers of experimental fiction and magic realism.”
– Tufts Magazine
“Talking bears, talking dogs, time travel and a mid-life crisis: Tad Crawford’s brilliantly original and entertaining first novel, A Floating Life, brings South American magical realism to 21st-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
“A haunting, unusual, sui generis, and wonderfully sustained novel that also manages to be hilarious. I loved it.”
— Nick Lyons
“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.
“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
On Wine-Dark Seas: A Novel of Odysseus and his Fatherless Son Telemachus debuted in 2023. As the flap copy states, “Countless readers have thrilled to the adventures of Odysseus in The Iliad and The Odyssey, but what further adventures awaited him after his ten years of war and ten years of wandering? Narrated by Telemachus to the bard Phemios, On Wine-Dark Seas speaks of the human drama of a man gone twenty years from home and family, a man who saw Troy on the night of its destruction, a man who lives the special quest which is his destiny. In probing the inner journeys of a son and father separated twenty years who must come to terms with each other and their ruthless slaughter of the suitors of Penelope, it reveals the doubts and joys of Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus. As Telemachus tells Phemios: ‘My father will be known to the future not as the man he was, but as the man of whom you sing. Often at Troy he called himself “the father of Telemachus,” so I too have a part to speak in his story. Wealthy men can pay some poets to chant a story first this way, then another. I cannot offer you wealth to hear me, but only the truth I know.’ The novel is a masterful recreating of the ancient mind, the landscape of Greece steeped in mythos and the gods, and the human dramas of characters made famous for all time by The Iliad and The Odyssey.”
A video of my presentation on A Classical Wisdom Podcast titled “The Sequel to the Odyssey?” can be found on YouTube.
Praise for On Wine-Dark Seas:
“Tad Crawford has excavated literary treasure from the fragments of epics that continued the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Channeling the voice of Telemachus, son of Odysseus, he conjures up a lost world of gods and heroes in a towering triumph of poetic imagination. He somehow makes the distant past as real and present as the back of your hand, and as entertaining and compelling as the epics were to the Greeks of old.”
– Christopher Vogler, author of The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers
“Odysseus changes from myth to man, from absent and fearless adventurer to challenged father in this stunning and wise story of his return to Ithaca, his slaying of the suitors, and his last years. A compelling, original, and brilliant novel. You’ll never forget it.”
– Nick Lyons, author of Fire in the Straw
“Crawford captures the essence of myth. Unfolding his story from the inside out – as if something magical is being born – he uses the timeless Trojan Cycle from which Homer shaped The Odyssey to paint the challenges of Odysseus’s life on Ithaca with grown son, aging wife, and the relatives of the slaughtered suitors. Passionate and wise, this is a novel to savor.”
– Dana C. White, PhD, Host/Producer of The Myth Salon
“The Homeric spirit, alive and productive, can reside in a modern author. That author is Tad Crawford, the story he tells is an inspired one narrated by Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, to the poet Phemios, not in the language of modern day, but as if mentored by the spirit of Homer in words and images that sing as in ancient times, close to nature, alive with gods. I urge you to read this book, but not just with your eyes. Read it aloud, so that it immerses your ears and engages your tongue with sounds uncommonly heard these days but sounds that carry a clarion call to what we have lost from the past but sorely need for the future. Bravo!”
– Russell Lockhart, author of Psyche Speaks and Words as Eggs
“Heroes and legends, fathers and sons, long journeys home, and then what happens after, this is a meticulously researched, felt, and necessary exploration of a forgotten and unexplored corner of what might very well be the greatest and most enduring story ever told.”
– Christopher Cosmos, author of Once We Were Here