Sean Michaels

Books

• Do You Remember Being Born?
• The Wagers
• Us Conductors

Do You Remember Being Born? (2023)

My third novel is the story of seven days in California, as a 75-year-old poet named Marian Ffarmer accepts a commission to collaborate with a mysterious new AI, named Charlotte.

It's a book about technology and language, but also family, inheritance, and labour. I began the book in 2019, three years before the release of ChatGPT, but used similar tools to generate some of the passages in the book.

Do You Remember Being Born? was one of the books of the year according to WIRED, The Globe & Mail, CBC, Inside Hook and Al Bawaba, and a finalist for the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize.

Praise for Do You Remember Being Born?:

The definitive novel about art in the age of AI

WIRED

Timely and lovely ... No matter your stance on AI, Do You Remember Being Born? is a tender and moving character portrait full of sharp scenes and memorable observations. While the novel might have a timely premise, it’s a jumping-off point for timeless meditations on art, family, connection and the meaning of a life. These topics will always speak to us, at least until we’re replaced by the machines.

The New York Times Book Review

Do You Remember Being Born? is wildly unique now, but it might be the forebear of a whole new genre of writing.

The Globe & Mail

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

In the lead-up to DYRBB's release, I published several essays about AI and art:

For The New Yorker, "What to Do About Fake Drake Songs," a piece that brings together Alanis Morissette, cover songs, A.I. Drake and the lessons to be learned from the legal battles over hip-hop and sampling in the 1990s.

For The Baffler, "Chat's Entertainment," a long essay calling for smaller, weirder AI as an alternative to Big Tech's monolithic authorities.

For Lithub, I wrote a craft essay, "On Collaborating with AI to Write a Novel." Maclean's ran a similar piece, titled "Why I used AI to write my novel."

Do You Remember Being Born? was included at the top of The New York Times' list of "New Fiction to Read this Fall", as well as most-anticipated lists by Lithub, The Millions, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. The book has also featured in numerous pieces examining AI, art and fiction, including articles at the Associated Press, Esquire (twice), a marvelous A.O. Scott essay for The New York Times, and a lovely article by Terry Nguyen in the Boston Review.

Some reviews: Lincoln Michel in The New York Times, Brian Bethune in The Walrus, Josh O'Kane in The Globe & Mail, Camille-Yvette Welsch in Foreword, Jill Wilson in The Winnipeg Free Press, Zhan Fei at The Hong Kong Economic Journal, Simon Demetriou at The Cyprus Mail, Emily Mernin at The Montreal Review of Books, Publishers' Weekly, and Matthew Jackson at BookPage. Thank you so much to all the critics who turned their attention to the book.

I've done interviews about the novel with Publisher's Weekly, the Montreal Gazette, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Our Culture mag, Vish Khanna's Kreative Kontrol podcast, CBC Radio's The Next Chapter, Interlocutor, and the wonderful Weird Era literary podcast.

I was also asked to come up with playlists for the novel: for Powell's Bookshop I tried to evoke the energy & atmosphere of DYRBB; for Largehearted Boy, I thought about songs of caring and intention.

In March 2024, Do You Remember Being Born?'s first translation appeared: Sophie Voillot's wonderful French version for Éditions Alto, Te souviens-tu de ta naissance?. They also published a translation of my Lithub essay on writing with A.I.: "Quand les serveurs petillent."

The Wagers (2019)

The Wagers is my second novel. It's about luck, life, and groceries. And a gang of magical thieves.

The Globe & Mail called it "a literary fireworks display." It's the story of Theo Potiris, a grocer and would-be comedian, who throws it all away to start making bigger bets - with burglars and mathematicians, lovers and billionaires.

Jackpots happen. Adventure unfolds. A novelist gets robbed. A rainbow macaw comes fluttering out of a flue. A woman rolls six sixes on her dice.

There’s a book-within-the-book, about saints' bones and farmland. There are detectives and stand-up comedians, diners and sand dunes. Also: moonlight, a Rihanna song, and a Silicon Valley mogul in search of enlightenment.

It's my clumsy way of writing about making art and the meaning of life—in a Pinkwatered version of the city that's my home.

Praise for The Wagers:

This novel is like a literary fireworks display, an explosion of joke-filled energy that manages to be a novel of ideas, but one delivered as if it were a caper story, including offbeat characters in the manner of Oceans 11 or an episode of Mission: Impossible.

The Globe and Mail

The Wagers is a work of great poise and maturity. But it’s also just plain fun, gloriously unafraid to play and laugh and throw jokes out into the room to see whether they land.

The Montreal Review of Books

A wistful and wondrously inventive novel.

Booklist

Curious readers can also read more detailed profiles and interviews in Bomb Magazine, The Montreal Gazette, the Winnipeg Free Press and The Montreal Review of Books.

The novelist Catherine Leroux (who translated Us Conductors into French) also did an incredible job transforming The Wagers into Les coups de dés, which was published in Québec with Éditions Alto. It has a stunning cover by the cartoonist Pascal Girard, and in 2022 the Globe & Mail published a wonderful profile examining the unique features of this translation project.

Us Conductors (2014)

My first novel was a fictional reimagining of the inventor of the theremin. It received the Giller Prize, Canada's most important literary award, in 2014.

When Us Conductors begins, it is 1938. On a ship steaming its way from Manhattan back to Leningrad, Lev Sergeyvich Termen writes a letter to his “one true love”, Clara Rockmore, telling her the story of his life. Imprisoned in his cabin, he recalls his early years as a scientist, inventing the theremin and other electric marvels, and the Kremlin’s dream that these inventions could be used to infiltrate capitalism itself. Instead, New York infiltrated Termen – he fell in love with the city’s dance clubs and speakeasies, with the students learning his strange instrument, and with Clara, a beautiful young violinist.

Eventually, Termen’s spy games fall apart. He is forced to return home, where he’s consigned to a Siberian gulag. His wits may save him, but they also plunge him even deeper toward the dark heart of Stalin's Russia.

I think of it as a book about love, music, espionage and the risks of self-invention.

Us Conductors was a #1 bestseller, and editions have appeared with Random House (Canada), Tin House (USA), and Bloomsbury (UK/Aus). The novel has also been translated into French (Québec/France), Czech and Italian, and there is an Audible audiobook.

Praise for Us Conductors:

What a debut. . . . A continent-spanning historical epic.

The Globe and Mail, Favourite Debuts of the Year.

One of the most striking, lyrical and original literary debuts in recent memory.

The Montreal Gazette

Both the voice and the stories it tells transcend the dusty contrivances of much historical fiction, resulting in a novel that feels both fresh and timeless.

Kirkus starred review

It is a wonderful book. . . . His story is so extraordinary and so beautifully and deftly told.

The Guardian

Chosen as a book of the year by NPR, The Observer, Quill & Quire, Flavorwire and The Globe & Mail.

Winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the QWF/Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. Nominated for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Canadian Authors Association Award, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses Firecracker Award, the Vine Award, and the International Dublin Literary Award. Catherine Leroux's wonderful French translation, Corps conducteurs, was nominated for the Prix des libraires du Québec and received the prestigious John Glassco Literary Translation Prize.

This is my website so I'm allowed to unspool some other Us Conductors miscellanea:

In the lead-up to the book's publication, I called in all my best favours and created three really strange webpages. They're still online:

• "Whispering Machine", designed by Luc Mikelsons, with a tiny scrap of original music by Bear In Heaven.
• "I Gazed At A Long Shelf of Batteries", designed by Jez Burrows, with a morsel by Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards.
• "Our Shadows Slanting by the Lamps", designed by Brendan Reed, with music generously donated by Owen Pallett.

The morning after I won the Giller, I sat down for a dumbfounded radio interview with CBC's Q; watch that interview here (I still haven't dared revisit it).

Later that week, Graham Hughes headed down to Café Olimpico, where I wrote much of the book, to ask the baristas about it.

Another favourite interview was this one, with Vish Khanna's Kreative Kontrol podcast, before the novel had even come out. Speaking of highlights: the time I was interviewed by Nardwuar the Human Serviette!

Here's an essay on the theremin that I wrote for the Observer, and I was also proud to contribute to Lindsay Michael's Sunday Edition radio documentary on the instrument, "Out of Thin Air."

This is a piece about the ways JRR Tolkien inspired the novel.

Sometimes people ask me to recommend theremin videos on YouTube. Here are three picks: Clara Rockmore performing "The Swan," Rob Schwimmer doing the theme from Vertigo, and Pamelia Kurstin's marvellous TED talk. I have had the honour of appearing with Schwimmer - and other theremin virtuosi like Lydia Kavina, Thorwald Jørgensen, Dorit Chrysler and Carolina Eyck - while touring with the book. It has been fascinating - and occasionally very moving - to watch how all these players hold their hands.