OF FLOATING ISLES - Kawika Guillermo (with Larissa Lai)

Join us for the Toronto launch of Kawika Guillermo's Of Floating Isles! In conversation with Larissa Lai.

ABOUT THE BOOK

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 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 father, caregiver, and mourner. Through a mixture of fanciful musing, rigorous inquiry, and unflinching self-reflection, Of Floating Isles reframes the gamer's retreat from others not as social isolation, but as a quest for a different community, one where they feel seen, heard, and understood. This deep-seated longing to belong, Guillermo suggests, forms the imaginative worlds of video games and the floating isles they conjure.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kawika Guillermo (they/he) is an award-winning author whose books include Stamped: an anti-travel novel (Westphalia Press), Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir (Duke University Press), and Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games (NYU Press). They co-edited the anthology Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us (Duke University Press) and designed the game Stamped: an anti-travel game (Analgesic Productions). They have lived in Portland, Las Vegas, Seattle, Gimhae, Nanjing, Hong Kong, and Vancouver. They currently teach game studies at the University of British Columbia.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Larissa Lai is the author of nine books including The Lost Century, The Tiger Flu, and Salt Fish Girl. Recipient of the Jim Duggins Novelist's Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Astraea Award, and the Otherwise Honor Book, she has also been a finalist for the ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism, the Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Governor General's Award. She is the Richard Charles Lee Chair of Chinese Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto.

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