Mr. Penumbra's strange bookstore

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The strange bookstore of Mr. Penumbra (original title: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore ) is the 2012 debut novel by the American writer Robin Sloan . The novel appeared on the San Francisco Chronicle's 2012 list of 100 Best Books , on an editorial shortlist, the New York Times bestseller list, and was also on National Public Radio's bestseller list for a total of 30 weeks .

Editions of the book have appeared in over 20 countries and translations in German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Finnish, Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, Chinese and Korean, among others. In 2013 a short novel telling the history of Mr. Ajax Penumbra was published under the title Ajax Penumbra 1969 , initially only as an e-book , then in 2014 in a print edition and in German translation (The incredible discovery of Mr. Penumbra) .

content

Clay Jannon lives in a shared apartment in San Francisco, has lost his job as a web designer and is therefore forced to take over the night shift in a bookstore that is open around the clock, the eponymous Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore . The range consists partly of relatively normal paperbacks, but for the most part of peculiar titles that are not listed anywhere else, the content of which consists of apparently meaningless cryptic letter sequences. This part is reserved for the members of a mysterious group who appear at night, bring back individual volumes and take others back with them. Although Mr. Penumbra, the strange owner of the shop, has forbidden Clay to read the contents of the encoded books, Clay's curiosity is stronger and with the help of his friends he succeeds in at least partially solving the riddle means that the solution to the riddle is another riddle.

An essential element of the narrative is the cultural contrast between, on the one hand, the borrowers of the encoded books, a group of rather bizarre characters who turn out to be members of a 500-year-old secret society called Unbroken Spine (" Unbroken Spine "), and on the on the other hand, the friends of Clay, all natives of the brave new digital world, who have what the one group tried to find out in decades of work can be done in one afternoon via Hadoop in the cloud . This group of superfood- fed digital citizens includes Kat Potente, Clay's new friend, who of course works for Google. So it is about the contrast between the new world of digital knowledge and the old world of books, abbreviated to OK in Google jargon as Old Knowledge ("old knowledge") .

In addition to the numerous references to the digital world (Google, Wikipedia, Amazon's Mechanical Turk etc.) there are also many references to popular culture, especially the fantasy world of role-playing games in the manner of Dungeons & Dragons , which Clay enthusiastically played with his childhood friend Neel - Neel is now the owner of a software company that earns millions with digital breast simulations, as well as the Sword & Sorcery novels, represented by the ironically repeatedly cited fictional novel cycle of the Dragon-Song Chronicles , based on Anne McCaffrey's Drachenreiter von Pern .

expenditure

  • First edition: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2012, ISBN 978-0-37421-491-3 .
  • Paperback: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore . Picador, New York 2013, ISBN 978-1-250-03775-6 .
  • German translation: The strange bookstore of Mr. Penumbra . From the American by Ruth Keen. Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-89667-480-7 .
  • Audio: Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour bookstore. A novel. Complete audio book edition on 7 CDs, read by Ari Fliakos. Macmillan Audio, New York 2012, ISBN 978-1-4272-3374-5 .
  • E-Book: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore . Atlantic Books, New York 2012, ISBN 978-1-78239-119-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Best books of 2012: 100 recommended books , Listed by John McMurtrie, San Francisco Chronicle, December 12, 2012, accessed December 2, 2016
  2. ^ Editors Choice , New York Times Sunday Book Review, December 21, 2012
  3. ↑ New York Times Hardcover Fiction Best Seller list for October 28, 2012 , New York Times, accessed January 1, 2013.
  4. ↑ Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore , NPR, accessed December 2, 2016.