The Magicians by Lev Grossman

I think I get the point Lev Grossman is trying to make in The Magicians. It's best summed up by this quote, which is part of a lecture given to the protagonist, Quentin, by one of his companions:
Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it; there's nothing else. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.
The Magicians is the story of Quentin, a gifted high school student who learns he has the potential to become a magician. He enrolls at Brakebills, a magical academy, and studies there for five years. That's Book I. (The novel is divided into four parts.) Book II deals with the jaded, booze-soaked lives of Quentin and his friends after graduation. In Book III, Q... Read More

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Lev Grossman’s The Magicians attempts to take the unreal world of fantasy — magic, spellcasting, other worlds, fabulous beasts — and tie it much more tightly to the real world than is usually done. And (I think) the attempt as well is to tell a “realistic” novel which takes as its premise that magic exists and is being used (not quite the same thing as the first). I’d say he only partially succeeds, though he does so often enough that the book makes a worthy, if not fully satisfying, read.

The Magicians is divided into sections. Book One introduces Quentin on his way to a school interview with his best friend. Eventually, Quentin somehow ends up at Brakehill Academy for a different kind of test and interview — to enter Brakehill’s school of magic (which is like a grittier, more realis... Read More

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Quentin Coldwater was just another gifted kid trying to impress a pretty girl by getting into an Ivy League school. His life changes when he finds himself writing an entry test at an academy for magicians. Soon, he and a group of undergrads are doing their best to get ahead of the competition. Sadly, by the end of his first year, Quentin and his friends are doing their best to act urbane about their power for lack of anything else to do.

At times, I found these urbane characters an irritating distraction from an otherwise enjoyable fantasy. Sadly, they take Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Read More

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

The Magicians by Lev Grossman is one of the most frequently reviewed fantasy novels of the last few years, which isn’t surprising because the author is a well known writer (and book reviewer) for TIME Magazine, and the book was very effectively hyped as “Harry Potter with college age students.” The end result of all of this is that lots of people who don’t regularly read fantasy have picked up this novel, and many of them had their expectations severely challenged. So, is The Magicians also worth the time for true-blooded, die-hard fantasy fans? In a word: yes.

You probably already know the basic plot summary for The Magicians. If not, “Harry Potter with college age students” is actually a fairly accurate way to sum up the plot at its most basic level. Quentin is a very bright teenager trying to test int... Read More

The Magician King by Lev Grossman

In Lev Grossman’s novel The Magicians, Quentin Coldwater — a geeky fantasy-loving high school senior — has his life turned upside down when he is invited to take an entrance exam for Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. After spending years learning the craft, and some time outside of school in a Bret Easton Ellis novel kind of existence, life is turned around again when he and several of his newfound magician friends discover that Fillory — the magical setting of a series of beloved children’s books (think Narnia and you’ve got it) — is real. And they can go there.

“Real” is a key word in The Magicians and in Grossman’s follow-up, The Magician King. Fillory, it turns out, is more “real” than people might want; it has all the ills — the violence, the death, the ugliness, the... Read More

The Magician King by Lev Grossman

At the end of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, Brakebills graduate Quentin Coldwater abandoned a cushy but dead-end insecure job to become co-ruler of the magical land of Fillory with his former classmates Eliot and Janet and his erstwhile flame Julia. I absolutely loved the drama of that final scene, with Eliot, Janet and Julia hovering thirty stories up in the air and shattering Quentin’s office window to drag him along on this new adventure.

The Magicians left lots of questions unanswered. How did Julia meet Eliot and Janet, and how exactly did she get so strong? What happened to Josh? Or Penny, for that matter? What was actually going on with the whole Neitherlands setup? Is it just a coincidence that it resembled a huge version of a welters board? (Or more likely the other way round: is the welters board meant to look like ... Read More

The Magician King by Lev Grossman

Quentin Coldwater returns and he is now both a magician of Earth and a king of Fillory, Lev Grossman’s version of Narnia. Quentin is in search of a quest, the one that’s for him and him alone, and it doesn’t take long for him to find it.

It also doesn’t take long for Quentin to begin wryly reflecting on the world around him, and Grossman can hardly resist either. Between them, Lev and Quentin manage to make allusions to just about every nerdy, geeky, suburban aspect of North American life that Grossman thinks his audience can think of, ranging from iPhones to D&D to John Knowles’ A Separate Peace. Keeping up on these inside jokes can get a little tiresome, but who are we to scoff at something that clearly brings Grossman so much satisfaction?
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The Magician King by Lev Grossman

I’m not a big fan of post-modernism. I realize that saying that and going on to review a Lev Grossman novel is a little bit like ordering a mai tai and then complaining because it’s got rum in it, but I’m going to anyway. The review, I mean, not the mai tai.

The Magician King is the sequel to Grossman’s highly successful fantasy novel The Magicians, and follows four young Americans who graduated from a magical school in up-state New York, had adventures (kind of ) and are now kings and queens of an alternate realm called Fillory. Any resemblance to the plot of The Chronicles of Narnia is purely intentional. The Magician King is marketed as Book Two of a trilogy, but there’s always the risk that Grossman will become drunk with celebrity and try for a “septimology,” to match the series he is attempting to deconstruct.

Postmodernism believes ... Read More

We have with us today, Lev Grossman, in addition to writing book reviews for Time Magazine, Lev is also the internationally best-selling author of The Magicians, Warp, and Codex. His Nerd World blog has recently relaunched as Techland.com. But Lev promises that a) he is still a nerd; and b) he will still be blogging about nerd culture.

SB Frank: I was looking at your website and I saw that you’ve written on some fascinating topics.  One article in particular that caught my eye was a piece “Catalog This,” that talked about the bizarre things that are sometimes bequeathed to libraries as part of the estates of famous personas, such as Dante’s ashes, etc.  If you could pick one bizarre i...