Lost at Sea

“Lost at Sea is both a highly specific account of one controversial community and a larger meditation on the nation’s worsening issues of social and financial inequality. It’s also a reminder of the vital narratives that can only be told when someone is willing to devote their life to a single subject for years on end. In its pages, Kloc expertly provides both a fascinating historical record of the anchor-outs’ ever-shifting form as well as dispatches from his firsthand reporting.” – San Francisco Chronicle

”…A sensitive portrait of a surprising community on the brink of destruction… It documents a new phase of the ongoing and escalating housing crisis: As people look for alternatives to unaffordable housing, new, fragile communities have sprung up or hung on, defying and nuancing our pictures of homelessness in America.” – New Republic

“A magisterial but unsentimental journey.” – Kirkus Reviews

“Enthralling…[Kloc] offers vivid portraits of the charming and welcoming anchor-outs themselves…without shying away from reporting on the community’s endemic violence and poverty. It’s an evocative portrait of America at the fringes.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Kloc’s sensitive book is a testament to the many ways that people care for one another, however imperfectly, and a record of the sustaining power of community.” – Booklist

“Kloc’s sensitive book is a testament to the many ways that people care for one another, however imperfectly, and a record of the sustaining power of community.” – BookPage

“Hardscrabble lives can be lived on water, too, as Joe Kloc shows in this exploration of the floating world of Sausalito’s ‘anchor-outs.’ Spending nights on their vessels and at the places they congregate on shore, he sets flashes of beautiful, eccentric humanity in a sober context of the history of the Bay Area, in particular its current housing crisis. Kloc is a smart and sympathetic witness to a precarious life in which these singular off-gridders, who ask for little more than to be ignored, seem like stowaways on their own boats.” – Ted Conover, author of Cheap Land Colorado and Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing

“In Lost At Sea, reporter Joe Kloc deftly leads us into and through the world of these housing insecure urban boat dwellers, vulnerable and colorful, as they attempt to find pleasure and beauty in the shadow of the failed American dream. It’s the most beguiling tale about houseboat dwellers since Penelope Fitzgerald’s classic Offshore.” – Alissa Quart, author of Squeezed and Bootstrapped

“Lost at Sea is an invaluable account of an unconventional community struggling to stay afloat. The story of the anchor-outs will resonate with all Americans, even the land-locked.” – Malcolm Harris, author of What’s Left and Palo Alto

“The depth of Joe Kloc’s reporting made me understand the history of California’s anchor-outs and the stakes of their fight against their millionaire neighbors and their local government. The vividness of his writing, meanwhile, made me care deeply about his characters–the pensioners, street preachers, and hemp farmers whose lives on the edges of our society are too often left out of stories about wealthy areas like the Bay Area.” – Megan Greenwell, author of Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream

“An absorbing chronicle of inequality in America. Kloc is a great writer and his careful attention to compelling details of place and speech–and to the rhythm of days and nights spent floating on the water–will make you feel like you’re bobbing on the bay with his characters through the last days of their outcast community.” – Anthony McCann, author of Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff

JOE KLOC is a reporter and senior editor at Harper’s Magazine, where he was a finalist for the 2019 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. His work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, New York magazine, and the New York Review of Books.