Us Conductors

Winner of the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize A beautiful, haunting novel inspired by the true life and loves of the famed Russian scientist, inventor and spy Lev Termen – creator of the theremin. Us Conductors takes us from the glamour of Jazz Age New York to the gulags and science prisons of the Soviet Union. On a ship steaming its way from Manhattan back to Leningrad, Lev 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. Amid ghostly sonatas, kung-fu tussles, brushes with Chaplin and Rockefeller, a mission to Alcatraz, the novel builds to a crescendo: Termen’s spy games fall apart and he is forced to return home, where he’s soon consigned to a Siberian gulag. Only his wits can save him, but they will also plunge him even deeper toward the dark heart of Stalin’s Russia. Us Conductors is a book of longing and electricity. Like Termen’s own life, it is steeped in beauty, wonder and looping heartbreak. How strong is unrequited love? What does it mean when it is the only thing keeping you alive? This sublime debut inhabits the idea of invention on every level, no more so than in its depiction of Termen’s endless feelings for Clara – against every realistic odd. For what else is love, but the greatest invention of all? “Michaels’ book is based on the life of Lev Termen, the Russian-born inventor of the Theremin, the most ethereal of musical instruments. As the narrative shifts countries and climates, from the glittery brightness of New York in the 1920s to the leaden cold of the Soviet Union under Stalin, the grace of Michaels’s style makes these times and places seem entirely new. He succeeds at one of the hardest things a writer can do: he makes music seem to sing from the pages of a novel.” —Giller Prize Jury Citation

Literature & Fiction

Michaels, Sean

Literary

Random House Canada

Vintage Canada

Winner of the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize A beautiful, haunting novel inspired by the true life and loves of the famed Russian scientist, inventor and spy Lev Termen – creator of the theremin. Us Conductors takes us from the glamour of Jazz Age New York to the gulags and science prisons of the Soviet Union. On a ship steaming its way from Manhattan back to Leningrad, Lev 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. Amid ghostly sonatas, kung-fu tussles, brushes with Chaplin and Rockefeller, a mission to Alcatraz, the novel builds to a crescendo: Termen’s spy games fall apart and he is forced to return home, where he’s soon consigned to a Siberian gulag. Only his wits can save him, but they will also plunge him even deeper toward the dark heart of Stalin’s Russia. Us Conductors is a book of longing and electricity. Like Termen’s own life, it is steeped in beauty, wonder and looping heartbreak. How strong is unrequited love? What does it mean when it is the only thing keeping you alive? This sublime debut inhabits the idea of invention on every level, no more so than in its depiction of Termen’s endless feelings for Clara – against every realistic odd. For what else is love, but the greatest invention of all? “Michaels’ book is based on the life of Lev Termen, the Russian-born inventor of the Theremin, the most ethereal of musical instruments. As the narrative shifts countries and climates, from the glittery brightness of New York in the 1920s to the leaden cold of the Soviet Union under Stalin, the grace of Michaels’s style makes these times and places seem entirely new. He succeeds at one of the hardest things a writer can do: he makes music seem to sing from the pages of a novel.” —Giller Prize Jury Citation 
 From the Trade Paperback edition.

Comprehensively covering each component of the Netscape ONE suite, this book was developed in conjunction with technical review by Netscape engineers. The book features an overview of HTML, JavaScript, and Java components and an introduction to LiveConnect and the Plug-in API updated for Navigator 4.0. The CD-ROM includes the SDKs for the ONE platform and sample applications.

Official Netscape One Book

Computers & Technology

Duncan, Luke

Networking & Cloud Computing

Ventana Pr

Includes information on migrating existing IFC applications to the JFC. Features tips for moving smoothly from AWT to JFC. Provides a detailed description of the JFC event model. Features real-world examples. Developed in conjunction with Netscape Communication Corporation's Java group.

Official Netscape Jfc Developer's Guide

Coriolis Group

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 Farmer is a world-renowned poet and a legend in the making; only now that she's 75 years old, in the tender half of her life, can she finally believe in the security of her hard-earned successes. But for a poet, these successes don't necessarily translate to capital, and as her adult son struggles to purchase his first home, she's left to ponder the impact of her choices. Marian's pristine life of mind-for which she's sacrificed nearly all personal relationships, from romance to friendship to motherhood-has come at no insignificant 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 highly intelligent 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. But as unexpectedly welcome to Marian as suddenly being a financially reliable parent is her generative, growing fascination with the strange, inquisitive, and artificially but emotionally intelligent Charlotte. 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 unsettling 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.

Do You Remember Being Born?: A Novel

United States

Astra House

Us Conductors is the story of the man who created the most magical musical instrument in the world, the theremin. It's a tale of electricity and espionage, jazz and kung-fu, Harlem and Siberia, and the way even doomed love can keep you alive. Locked in a cabin aboard a ship bearing him back to Russia and away from the love of his life, Lev Sergeyvich Termen begins to type his story: a tale of electricity, romance and the invention of the world’s strangest instrument, the theremin. He recollects his early years as a scientist forging breakthroughs during the Bolshevik Revolution and his decade as a Manhattan celebrity and reluctant Soviet spy. Against the backdrop of Prohibition and the 1929 Crash, Termen spends his days in his workshop, devising inventions, and his nights in Harlem clubs, jostling with famous bandleaders and falling in love with the young violinist Clara Reisenberg. When the boat reaches his homeland, Termen finds it is not the Russia he remembers. He is imprisoned in the Gulag system, sent first to a Siberian work camp and then to a secret laboratory. In the face of all this, his love for Clara remains constant, passing through the ether like the theremin’s song. Steeped in beauty, wonder, and looping heartbreak, Sean Michaels’s debut novel explores the lies we tell, the truths we imagine, and the lengths we go to survive.

Us Conductors: A Novel

Tin House Books

From Giller-Prize-winning author Sean Michaels, The Wagers is a wild and magical novel about what it means to not only chase luck, but find it.
When Theo Potiris performed his stand-up comedy act on Conan at 25, he thought he’d hit it big. But ten years later, he's still spending his days working at his parents’ grocery store, bicycling to the local open mic, and writing letters to a girlfriend who lives halfway around the world. Theo’s desperate for a break. But when he brings his thirteen-year-old niece to the horse track to place a birthday bet―a Potiris family tradition―the goddess of good luck strikes her instead, in the form of a small fortune. Try as he might to be happy for her, Theo’s shock and envy finally push him out of the family nest, away from his comedy dreams and toward a new calling.
First: a mysterious corporation called The Rabbit’s Foot, which carefully quantifies and cashes in on luck. Then: to a gang of vigilantes, who recruit Theo to help them steal luck from those who carry more than their fair share. The Wagers is a literary motorcycle chase, carried by stylish prose and delightful invention. But it’s also an investigation of work and purpose, happiness and art, the randomness of good fortune, and all the ways we choose to wage our lives.

The Wagers

Dramas & Plays

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Michaels, Sean. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Michaels, Sean

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Michaels, Sean. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Us Conductors

Us Conductors

Us Conductors

Official Netscape One Book

Official Netscape Jfc Developer's Guide

Do You Remember Being Born?: A Novel

Us Conductors: A Novel

The Wagers