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A Novel
by Sean Michaels
Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels's moving, innovative and deeply felt novel about an aging poet who agrees to collaborate with a Big Tech company's poetry AI, named Charlotte.
Marian Ffarmer is a world-renowned poet and a legend in the making—but only now, at 75 years old, is she beginning to believe in the security of her successes. Unfortunately, a poet's accomplishments don't necessarily translate to capital, and as her adult son struggles to buy his first home, her confidence in her choices begins to fray. Marian's pristine life of mind—for which she's sacrificed nearly all personal relationships, from romance to friendship to motherhood—has come at a cost.
Then comes a cryptic invitation from the Tech Company. Come to California, the invitation beckons, and write with a machine. The Company's lucrative offer—for Marian to co-author a poem in a 'historic partnership' with their cutting-edge poetry bot, named Charlotte—chafes at everything she believes about artmaking as an individual pursuit ... yet, it's a second chance she can't resist. And so to California she goes, a sell-out and a skeptic, for an encounter that will unsettle her life, her work and even her understanding of kinship.
Both a love letter to and interrogation of the nature of language, art, labor, capital, family, and community, Do You Remember Being Born? is Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels's empathetic response to some of the most disquieting questions of our time—a defiant and joyful recognition that if we're to survive meaningfully at all, creative legacy is to be reimagined and belonging to one's art must mean, above all else, belonging to the world.
"A timely work reminiscent of Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2 (1995), Michaels' tale shows how AI can, paradoxically, stymie creation through its limitlessness and need for human guidance. This is also a compelling portrait of a tricorne-wearing poet famously dedicated to her craft." —Booklist
"Michaels merges modernist poetry with contemporary technology in this inventive outing ... [Do You Remember Being Born? asks] probing and humane questions about what it means to be an artist." —Publishers Weekly
"Sean Michaels achieves an astonishing level of narrative, emotional and psychological density with his tightly focused novel Do You Remember Being Born? ... Sentence by sentence, line by line, Michaels builds a beautiful structure with dizzying, surprising imagery, conjuring metaphors that will leave you with a smile and lingering questions ... Do You Remember Being Born? is a captivating success." —BookPage
"Beautiful, wise, thought-provoking, and funny—Do You Remember Being Born? is the guiding light I have been waiting to follow through the confusion of what constitutes great art in these times. The answer? You are holding it in your hands." —Ceridwen Dovey, author of Life After Truth
"Could a novel be any timelier than Do You Remember Being Born? Wonderfully written, it makes you think, on every single page, of where it is we're going as a species." —Douglas Coupland, author of Worst. Person. Ever.
This information about Do You Remember Being Born? was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sean Michaels is a novelist, short story writer and critic. He is the founder of pioneering music blog Said the Gramophone. His debut novel, Us Conductors, received the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His second novel, The Wagers, appeared in 2019.
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