Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Popular Culture
Episode: Kawika Guillermo, "Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games" (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025)
Description: An immersive journey into the author's lifelong attachment to video games, revealing how they shape us, shatter us, and give us the courage to start again
Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025) is a captivating collection of personal essays that unpack the mystifying and often intimate roles that video games play in our lives. Interweaving memoir with cultural critique, Kawika Guillermo explores the subtle yet transformative influences of video games in shaping them as a queer and mixed-race grandson of two preachers; as a traveller, immigrant, and games scholar; and as a fathe...