Lev Grossman's 'The Magician King': Author Talks His New Book And Why Fantasy Is 'Culturally Radioactive'

Lev Grossman loves fantasy. He loves it so much, he writes about loving fantasy within his own fantasy novels. Grossman, who keeps his day job as a book critic for Time, released "The Magician King" Tuesday, the sequel to his well-loved novel, "The Magicians." The books follow the story of a young boy in Brooklyn, Quentin Coldwater, who is an avid reader of a fantasy series, until he stumbles into the very magical world he had previously only inhabited in books.

Given this premise, "The Magicians" and "The Magician King" -- which take their cue from "The Chronicles of Narnia," "Harry Potter" and "A Wizard of Earthsea" -- work on a meta level, acting as both fantasy novels and an homage to the fantasy novel. In an interview with The Huffington Post's Amy Lee and Paul Needham, Grossman discussed his decision to have a fantasy fan as his protagonist, explaining that it was born out of a desire for "everything that exists in our world to exist in his world."

He extends this thought to J.K. Rowling, who he feels missed a big opportunity to make Harry a fantasy-novel reader before he enters Hogwarts. "He looks like a 'Narnia' fan to me," Grossman said.

Aside from Potter, Grossman expanded on how much the fantasy genre has changed in the past 10 years, why fantasy novels are still treated as "culturally radioactive" by the mainstream press and what it feels like to be an author on one end and a book critic on the other.

Watch HuffPost Culture's interview with Grossman:

Comments

[rjmiller]

01:08 PM on 08/10/2011

I didn't really dig 'The Magicians,' but I appreciate that Grossman incorporated something that is just a huge gaping hole in other various teen magic series: sex. Who, given a variety of magic powers like shapeshifting and flight, wouldn't consider how these could be used for sex?

[Jason N]

01:39 PM on 08/10/2011

That caught my attention to. Someone suggested it because I liked HP but found the early books a tad childish. I'm still reading but wow, definitely not a kids book this one lol.

[rjmiller]

01:52 PM on 08/10/2011

Grossman and Rowling are strangely similar but opposites at the same time. When Rowling runs out of ideas, she introduces petty character drama and Harry SPEAKS ONLY IN CAPS HIGHLIGHTING HIS TEEN ANGST. When Grossman runs out of ideas, the characters get bored, have sex and hate each other (it could be argued that this is, in fact, what rich powerful teens would do when bored).

Grossman's major problem is that all of his characters are unlikeable. Rowling's is that her characters don't develop after the first act of the first book (except for maybe Neville).