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Robin Sloan

American novelist From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robin Sloan
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Robin Sloan is an American author. His debut novel, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, was published in 2012.

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Early life

Sloan was born to a home economics teacher and an appliance salesman.[1] He grew up in Troy, Michigan, where he attended Wattles Elementary School.[2] He graduated from Athens High School in 1998.[3]

Sloan attended Michigan State University, where he co-founded the literary magazine Oats. He was also a columnist and cartoonist for The State News student newspaper. He graduated in 2002 with a degree in economics from the Eli Broad College of Business.[3] He moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, after graduation for a fellowship at the Poynter Institute. In 2003, he founded the SnarkMarket blog with some friends.[4]

Sloan moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004 to work at Current TV as a media strategist/interactive producer.[4][5][6]

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Career

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Sloan crowdfunded his novella Annabel Scheme in 2009 through Kickstarter. After successfully funding the project, he quit his job at Current to write the novella full time.[7][4] About a thousand copies of the novella were printed and the novella was released under a Creative Commons NonCommercial license.[8]

Prior to working as an author, Sloan worked at Twitter as a media manager, helping news companies condense their reports to Twitter's 140 characters tweet limit.[5]

Sloan's first novel Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore was released in 2012. The story began as a 6,000 word short story published onto Sloan's personal website and Kindle Store.[9][4] The novel was listed in San Francisco Chronicle's list of top 100 books of 2012.[10] It is about a laid-off Silicon Valley tech worker who begins working at a dusty bookstore with very few customers, only to start discovering one secret after another. The mysterious old books, along with the store's owner, lead to a 500‑year‑old secret society.[11]

His second novel Sourdough was released in September 2017.[6] It was listed as one of the San Francisco Chronicle's top 100 books of 2017.[12]

His speculative fiction short story The Conspiracy Museum was published in The Atlantic in May 2020 as part of the "Shadowlands" project exploring conspiracy thinking in the United States.[13]

His third novel, Moonbound, was released on 11 June 2024.[14]

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Personal life

Sloan resides in Rockridge, Oakland, California.[1] Sloan and his partner Kathryn Tomajan produce olive oil under the Fat Gold brand. They harvest off of leased land in Sunol, California.[15]

Bibliography

  • Annabel Scheme (2010)
  • Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (2012) ISBN 978-1-92207-916-9
  • Ajax Penumbra 1969 (2013) ISBN 978-0-374-71184-9
  • Sourdough: Or, Lois and Her Adventures in the Underground Market: A Novel (2017) ISBN 978-0-374-20310-8[16]
  • Annabel Scheme and the Adventure of the New Golden Gate (2020) (Novella; "neither sequel nor prequel to the original Annabel Scheme novella published in 2009".)[17]
  • The Suitcase Clone (2022) ISBN 978-1-25088-265-3[18]
  • Moonbound (2024) ISBN 978-0374610609[14]
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References

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