Robin Sloan | |
---|---|
Born | United States |
Alma mater | Michigan State University |
Genre | Novels |
Notable works | Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore |
Website | |
www |
Robin Sloan is an American author. His debut novel, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, was published in 2012.
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]
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]
Sloan and his partner Kathryn Tomajan produce olive oil under the Fat Gold brand. They harvest off of leased land in Sunol, California. [14]
Sloan resides in Rockridge, Oakland, California. [1]