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Pan, August 2025
Hardcover / e-Book
Gamelife, September 2015
Hardcover / e-Book
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
September 2015
On Sale: September 15, 2015
225 pages
ISBN: 0865478287
EAN: 9780865478282
Kindle: B0105R9HBA
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
A boyhood and adolescence told through the lens of seven primitive computer games "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." Michael Clune's Gamelife is a sui generis memoir. It captures the essential strangeness of childhood, when the world is still revealing itself. It describes cafeteria politics, locker-room hazing, and divorce with a sharpness that will leave you laughing and squirming. It re-creates a place--1980s suburban Illinois, John Hughes movie territory--in all its quotidian glory. And it explores, like nothing before it, how the ephemeral worlds of video games gave shape to a boy's days.
 Media BuzzAll Things Considered - September 13, 2015
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