A Best Book of 2023 - Marie Claire, Inside Hook, Our Culture Magazine, WIRED

[A] timely and lovely new novel. --Lincoln Michel, The New York Times Book Review

A compassionate and lyrical portrait . . . Do You Remember Being Born? far outshines its peers. --Terry Nguyen, Boston Review

Sean Michaels has already written the definitive novel about art in the age of AI. --Kate Knibbs, WIRED

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.

Widowhood and weirdos, online and off, NORMA is so dark it smarts.

It's a terrible freedom to linger unaccounted for.

Norma is waking up and cracking up. Decades of marriage, housekeeping, and family responsibility: buried with her husband Hank. Now, she's free, gorging on an online riot of canceled soap operas, message boards, and grocery store focus groups. Transcribing chatter for fifty cents a minute. It's all of humanity--grim, funny, and desperate--wafting into her world, a world reeking with the funk of old fast food wrappers, cold stale recycled air, and desiccated car upholstery. And one where appropriate boundaries are suddenly slipping too, when a voice from one of her transcripts goes from virtual to IRL and just down the block.

NORMA is a tart, unhinged flail into widowhood, the parasocial, and some of the more careworn corners of the internet.

In the nursing home where Grace works she sees a headline flash across the TV. Highlights of hockey star Alex Saint play as the broadcaster announces that he's been accused of an assault. Grace can barely stand to watch. Leaving her foster brother was the hardest thing she's ever done. But ten years ago, when her life was crumbling around her, it was her only option. An act of desperation. She has thought about him every day since and is determined to help him in whatever way she can. She now needs to do the one thing she hates more than anything. Ask for a favor. From a man she's been harboring a crush on for years.

Told in a dual timeline, Nichelle Kovacheff's You Are Not Alone In This is a pacey commercial read about found families, sacrifice and relationships.

Toast Soldiers is a evocative short story collection from award-winning poet and author, Bruce Meyer. Stunningly dark and full of beautiful incongruities and absurdities, the stories center on characters grappling with a confounding universe. A boxer returns to his hometown after a decade away and, instead of finding solace from his failures in the ring, arrives in a ghost town that has taken as many, if not more, punches than he has ever had to endure himself. A prospector in the far north crashes his Curtis Jenny biplane in a snowstorm and during the night he witnesses his life unfold in the cinematic glow of the Northern Lights. A child with an imaginary friend murders his abusive father but learns that kindness is just a shadow away. A veteran of World War One attempts to prove, once and for all, that a horrific event he was part of was real despite historians who argue to the contrary. And there are many more. Toast Soldiers tells the stories of individuals who fight against the invincible fates they confront and attempt to assert themselves even though they know they are facing defeat.

In the early 1990?s, Caitlin Maharg, grieving the loss of her parents, leaves everything she knows in Canada for Northern Ireland to pursue her love of poetry while living in a cottage by the Irish Sea. Feeling like a child again in a distant land still affected by the Troubles, she is haunted by the secrets her parents? deaths unearthed. In her longing for emotional closeness, she befriends Andy Evans, a well-known poet with a roguish charm. Their attraction soon leads to a love affair. Flouting the paisley headscarf of respectability, she plunges into a relationship that gives her an entry to the literary world, but at a price. Filled with insights into grief, longing and creativity, The Most Cunning Heart is a novel about how a quiet heroine learns to navigate deception, love and loss.

It's 1999 and Harry Jackson has hit rock bottom. He dropped out of high school at seventeen to marry his pregnant girlfriend, Linda. Fifteen years later, he's an alcoholic and a pot head who ignores his lonely mother and would rather spend time at Bruno's, his favourite watering hole, than with his wife and kid. Fired from his menial job at the post office, Harry goes on a bender and crashes his son's science fair, waking up the next morning to find that his family has left him for good.

Harry heads to Bruno's and pours his heart out to the bartender, Ben, who zaps him with a mysterious object. He wakes up in 1983, seventeen again and with his whole life ahead of him. Convinced he can do it right this time, Harry cleans up his act, throwing himself into homework, mending his relationship with his mom, and ignoring Linda's advances. But soon, tragedy strikes, and Harry realizes that no matter how much he's learned from the past, he still can't control the future.

Full of heart, humour, and surprising twists, this coming-of-age story asks the age-old question, What if you could go back and do it all over again?

It's 1999 and Harry Jackson has hit rock bottom. He dropped out of high school at seventeen to marry his pregnant girlfriend, Linda. Fifteen years later, he's an alcoholic and a pot head who ignores his lonely mother and would rather spend time at Bruno's, his favourite watering hole, than with his wife and kid. Fired from his menial job at the post office, Harry goes on a bender and crashes his son's science fair, waking up the next morning to find that his family has left him for good.

Harry heads to Bruno's and pours his heart out to the bartender, Ben, who zaps him with a mysterious object. He wakes up in 1983, seventeen again and with his whole life ahead of him. Convinced he can do it right this time, Harry cleans up his act, throwing himself into homework, mending his relationship with his mom, and ignoring Linda's advances. But soon, tragedy strikes, and Harry realizes that no matter how much he's learned from the past, he still can't control the future.

Full of heart, humour, and surprising twists, this coming-of-age story asks the age-old question, What if you could go back and do it all over again?

Hugh Huge Newman, a library school dropout, banishes himself to a subarctic mining town for the winter. There, he discovers a whole world in miniature, with two sides, management and union, in perpetual war against each other, the leading combatants strangely reminiscent of problematic figures from Western history.

Almost immediately, the two warring sides work to lure the reluctant Huge from his bunkhouse and his books and into the frontline on their battles.

The story of Chye Chye Skudigus as told by Granny Hunger of Quesnel BC

Chye Chye is a bully, bothering the pioneers in the area. Only by getting together with the Chief Six Fingers can they find a solution to the problem.

The not-often seen together combination of poetic writing interspersed with historical events and modern-day occurrences with a view to the future marks Francis Catalano's work as noteworthy. Québec's past is vividly imagined, and The Origin of the Future reveals the author's background as a poet as he creates a kind of road trip partway between an essay and a novel. The narrator looks for what has come before him, what has shaped him. There is authenticity in this eclectic mixture of the present day and history, and courage in forging new territory to create an unusually original work.

The central figure of The Origin of the Future is North America. It talks about the origins of the continent: geological (before human beings), human origins (migration of people from Asia), colonial origins (the arrival of Europeans) and the origin of the author's own presence in North America. Catalano lends his voice to his ancestors, to his Italian grandfather, to his son ... who speak through him to tell their little story in America while History is told using a more enigmatic or poetic text, between each chapter. Then come the great outdoors of America, migrations, road trips, family.

WAKE UP SHEEPLE!

9/11 was an inside job.

The moon landings were faked.

JFK is alive and well and spends his days with Elvis.

Everyone knows what happened on 11/3/11. But do they really know the truth?

John Doe - JD to his friends - knows for a fact that things are not as they seem. The world is wearing blinders, but he has his eyes wide open. And the more you truly know, the crazier you seem.

Dive into a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and see the world through JD's eyes. AE Merrick's debut novel is a wild ride through mind control, paranoia, and isolation in search of the ever-elusive truth.