Forthcoming on 8 October 2026 with Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK and Astra House in the US.
“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.”
More details to be announced soon.
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The Imaginary Museum
August 2020
Published: 6 August 2020 in a print edition, as an audiobook and in a Kindle edition. Click here to buy via the Harper Collins website.
– “The Imaginary Museum is the most inventive writing on art I’ve read in a long while. By inviting us into his made-up institution, Ben Eastham opens up a space for reflection on how contemporary art helps us make sense of ourselves and the world around us. This is a brilliant book – a museum in the form of a parable.” (Lauren Elkin)
– “Ben Eastham is a critic with intelligence, verve and delirious wit, and in this essay he makes a lovely experiment with art criticism: proposing contemporary art as a charmed space for us all to explore a radical and comical subjectivity – flâneurs freed from the illusion of connoisseurship.” (Adam Thirlwell)
– “The Imaginary Museum is a brilliantly funny and enlightening wander through the often-baffling corridors of the contemporary art world. I loved it.” (Jennifer Higgie)
– “A splendid journey through the brilliant thought-constellations that deftly gather shape and luminosity in the mind of a young art critic.” (Chloe Aridjis)
– “There’s no place I’d rather visit now than Ben Eastham’s Imaginary Museum.” (Jennifer Kabat)
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My Life as a Work of Art
with Katya Tylevich
September 2016
– “Mr. Eastham is the star of the show … a terrific, ferociously self-effacing writer … achingly funny.” (Wall Street Journal)
– “Passionate, original, perceptive.” (The Art Newspaper)
– “A witty and intelligent defence of contemporary art.” (Hans Ulrich Obrist)