As a book critic yourself, how did those considerations play out writing The Magicians? I understand why Rowling would leave that out, but imagine how different his experience would have been if he spent all that time reading the Narnia books.īK Mag: In recent years there’s been much ado about the way that genre interacts with literary criticism.
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The Magicians began as a thought experiment: What would a magician look like if he had my life? If you were going to a school for magic, wouldn’t you be keenly aware of the ways that your life didn’t live up to books about that experience? I mean Harry Potter lived years in that tiny room and he didn’t read any fantasy novels before he went to Hogwarts. I would read the Harry Potter books and Narnia books when I was in my 30s and even though I felt very connected to those characters, I was aware that the people in them were living lives nothing like mind.
#The magicians land lev grossman serial#
They were such a string of serial failures. It’s funny because my own 20s were such a wipeout. The Magicians books are about filling in those blanks. What happens between the age of 18 to 35? There’s a whole different set of questions when you go into your 20s. You know, Harry Potter ends and then there’s this huge gap time gap before the epilogue. I was really into the idea of figuring out what happens in the middle of a magicians’ life. Grossman: Initially it was just a question of realism. They don’t just exist in a separate sphere, the characters are aware of Tolkien and Lewis and Rowling. It’s very much about coming to terms with the fact that you’re not the chosen one.īK Mag: One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about the Magicians books is that they interact with other fantasy literature. But there are elements of the books that are very much about my own experience. It’s funny thinking about the novels being autobiographical because, of course, magic isn’t real. Maybe when I’m 70 I can write about some 70-year-old magician I’ve come to the end of that arc for Quentin and also for me. I feel now very far away from that person. I was struggling with problems I was working out in the book. I was at a very different period in my life. You know, it took me five years to write when I started it back in 2004. Grossman: I think it’s the end for Quentin. I’m actually surprised to the extent that this didn’t get me into trouble.īK Mag: So does that leave Quentin Coldwater in a place where there could be a follow-up? As I was writing the second, I knew there would be a third, and I figured it would take care of itself. It was only after it came out that I started thinking what would come next. I was completely prepared to leave it as a stand-alone. My self-confidence was at sort of a low ebb that I didn’t think it would be published at all.
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I was very stuck personally and professionally. I was writing it during a dark period for me. When I was working on The Magicians I hadn’t made up my mind if there were going to be any more. Lev Grossman: This is a question that I don’t really have an answer to. Joseph’s College on August 5, Grossman spoke to Brooklyn Magazine about the end of the trilogy, genre, and disappointment.īrooklyn Magazine: Did you have the third book in your head when you started The Magicians ? How did you plot out the series? In August, Grossman publishes the finale to the trilogy, The Magician’s Land, a novel as hotly anticipated by the Comic-Con set, where Grossman recently went to promote the new installment, as the New York literary world.
#The magicians land lev grossman series#
Rowling’s Harry Potter series that complicated the idea of magic as a solution to the traumas, failures, and growing pains of young adulthood. Lev Grossman conjured up Coldwater and his comrades in 2009 with the best-selling fantasy novel The Magicians, an answer to the fantasy worlds of C.S. The adventures of Quentin Coldwater-a magician whose supernatural powers can’t help him avoid the awkwardness of his late teens and twenties-are drawing to a close.