Only Beo’s half of the correspondence is relayed in the novel. How do they transgress their stereotypes?Ĥ. Think about the powerful women and men in the novel. It is notable that the Marrow Fair workers assume the creator of the market to be a man it is also notable that Lois suspects a very specific type of man to be Mr. Marrow is kind of the lovechild between Dumbledore and the Wizard of Oz. What other examples of ownership and sharing-both of ideas and of commodities-occur in Sourdough? To what degree is working and creating independently useful, both within the novel and hypothetically? What about working and creating collaboratively?ģ. After the “fungal party hellscape” at the Fair, Lois is relieved to find that her name is not mentioned in the newspaper (241). How does her proprioception adapt to or resist these places?Ģ. Lois defines proprioception as “the process by which organisms judge the position of their own body parts in space.” (16) She inhabits various and distinct environments in the novel, most significantly General Dexterity, Camillo Street, the Marrow Fair, and the Lois Club.

Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore such a sensation, while taking on even more satisfying challenges, Sourdough marks the triumphant return of a unique and beloved young writer. Leavened by the same infectious intelligence that made Robin Sloan’s Mr. But then, an alternative emerges: a secret market that aims to fuse food and technology. When Lois comes before the jury that decides who sells what at Bay Area markets, she encounters a close-knit club with no appetite for new members. The company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer’s market, and a whole new world opens up. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she’s providing loaves daily to the General Dexterity cafeteria.

Lois is no baker, but she could use a roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms. She must keep it alive, they tell her-feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. In his much-anticipated new novel, Robin Sloan does for the world of food what he did for the world of books in Mr.

Sourdough the novel