Do You Remember Being Born? - Sean Michaels

Category: Adults, General Fiction, Sci-Fi
Language: English
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence Technology

Written by Sean Michaels
Read by Lisa Bunting, Alex Paxton-Beesley
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

FINALIST FOR THE 2023 PARAGRAPHE HUGH MACLENNAN AWARD FOR FICTION

Scotiabank Giller Prize-winner Sean Michaels’ luminous new novel takes readers on a lyrical joy ride—seven, epic days in Silicon Valley with a tall, formidable poet (inspired by the real-life Marianne Moore) and her unusual new collaborator, a digital mind just one month old. It’s both a love letter to and an aching examination of art-making, family, identity and belonging.

Marian Ffarmer is a world-renowned poet and a legend in the making—but only now, at seventy-five 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 coauthor 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.

Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
Release date: 09-26-23