Raincoast Books

What Will You Read Next?

Gamelife

A Memoir

9780865478282

Farrar Straus & Giroux
Available: 09/15/15
5.52 x 8.46 · 224 pages
9780865478282
CDN $28.99 · cl
With dust jacket

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Michael W. Clune

You have been awakened.
Floppy disk inserted, computer turned on, a whirring, and then this sentence, followed by a blinking cursor. So begins Suspended, the first computer game to obsess seven-year-old Michael, to worm into his head and change his sense of reality. Thirty years later he will write: Computer games have taught me the things you can't learn from people."
Gamelife is the memoir of a childhood transformed by technology. Afternoons spent gazing at pixelated maps and mazes train Michael's eyes for the uncanny side of 1980s suburban Illinois. A game about pirates yields clues to the drama of cafeteria politics and locker-room hazing. And in the year of his parents' divorce, a spaceflight simulator opens a hole in reality.
In telling the story of his youth through seven computer games, Michael W. Clune captures the part of childhood we live alone.
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Michael W. Clune is a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of a memoir titled White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin and of two scholarly books, American Literature in the Free Market and Writing Against Time .