Robin Sloan

CURIOUS strollers in early-16th-century Venice might have paused by the shop of the great printer Aldus Manutius only to be scared off by a stern warning posted over the door. "Whoever you are, Aldus asks you again and again what it is you want from him," it read. "State your business briefly, and then immediately go away." To state the current business at hand briefly, Aldus is the subject of a new exhibition commemorating the 500th anniversary of his death - and the birth of reading as we know it.

“Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling’s new book for adults, The Casual Vacancy, was published yesterday to great fanfare and decidedly mixed reviews. Some ebook readers are holding on off on purchasing the digital edition because it’s priced at $17.99 (here’s why), but e-reader owners who did buy it right away are in for a disappointment: It’s basically unreadable, unless you have a magnifying glass.

Jane Smiley, author, "Private Life" Reading fiction is and always was about learning to see the world through often quite alien perspectives. This remains essential. Matt de la Peña, author, "Mexican WhiteBoy" Kafka believed a book should wake us up with a blow to the head. But we don’t want our novels to do that anymore. Robin Sloan, writer and media inventor New and maturing media are not a threat to the novel, but a reminder of why it has endured. Thomas Glave, author, "The Torturer's Wife" The ways in which we respond to the work of art in

Here’s an interesting iOS appbook, found via Wired: Robin Sloan’s “Fish: A Tap Essay”. Sloan was bemused by the way we constantly “like” or “fave” things on the Internet, as a way of calling our friends’ attention to them, but then don’t ever go back to them ourselves. Why would we? There’s so much distraction, [...]