Escape Pod 215: Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store
Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store
By Robin Sloan
IT’S 2:02 A.M. ON A COLD SUMMER NIGHT.
I’m sitting in a book store next to a strip club.
Not that kind of book store. The inventory here is incredibly old and impossibly rare. And it has a secret—a secret that I might have just discovered.
I am alone in the store. And then, tap-tap, suddenly I’m not.
And now I’m pretty sure I’m about to snap my laptop shut, run screaming out the front door, and never return.
About the Author
Robin Sloan
Robin Sloan’s first novel, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, was a New York Times Best Seller, translated into more than twenty languages. His latest novel, Sourdough, was published in 2017. With his partner Kathryn Tomajan, Robin produces California extra virgin olive oil under the label Fat Gold. He lives in Oakland and works out of the Murray Street Media Lab in South Berkeley, down by the railroad tracks.
About the Narrator
Serah Eley
Serah Eley is a chaos spirit who first appeared in 2013, from the right cerebral hemisphere of a former podcaster named Steve Eley. Best known as the founding editor and host of Escape Pod, with the famous signoff “Have Fun,” Steve realized he was having more fun as Serah and gave her the body for transition and general mayhem. Now much prettier than Steve and at least seventy percent weirder, Serah lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her spouse Sadi and collects stories too fantastic to be fiction. If you ask nicely she may even tell some of them. Very nicely.