“The Magicians” by Lev Grossman (Arrow/Plume)

An intriguing first volume in a new series

In a secret world of forbidden knowledge, power comes at a terrible price...

Quentin Coldwater’s life is changed forever by an apparently chance encounter: when he turns up for his entrance interview to Princeton he finds his interviewer dead – but a strange envelope bearing Quentin’s name leads him down a very different path to any he’d ever imagined.

The envelope, and the mysterious manuscript it contains, leads to a secret world of obsession and privilege, a world of freedom and power and, for a while, it’s a world that seems to answer all Quentin’s desires. But the idyll cannot last – and when it’s finally shattered, Quentin is drawn into something darker and far more dangerous than anything he could ever have expected...

I’m rather late getting to this novel. It’s been out for a while, and I actually have multiple copies of it – eBook, UK edition, and also a signed US edition (which I picked up in January 2013 in Boston, when Mr Grossman dropped by the MLA conference). There’s been a lot written about this novel already, but I’ve been studiously avoiding any and all reviews. I really enjoyed reading this. It’s not perfect, but it is both clever and engaging. Obviously the first part of something much larger, I would certainly recommend it.

An Interview with LEV GROSSMAN

I first came across Lev Grossman through his columns for Time magazine, where he is a book critic and lead technology writer. Grossman is also the successful author of Codex, The Magicians and The Magician King, which has just been released in paperback. I decided it was a perfect time to get in touch and pick his brains about writing, his novels, and how he became a speculative fiction fan.

While I was Out… (Books Received)

Things have been pretty great on the book front recently, so I wanted to share some thoughts and info on some of the new novels that arrived while I was up in Durham for the last few weeks. Here’s the pile:

The top seven on the stacked pile were sent to New York, and Alyssa kindly forwarded them on to me. However, it’s entirely possible that I’ll be sending them right back, if all goes well on Thursday…

Week in Review (May 5-12)

This week, I’m afraid I wasn’t online that much, so I may well have missed a few articles and posts. Nevertheless, I did stumble across a few interesting articles. So, we have Sarah Fay of The Atlantic ponders the future of book reviews online; Lev Grossman is interviewed for Far Beyond Reality; Myke Cole writes about authors and their political views, and what sort of impact that can have on readers, and when it’s ok to voice these opinions; and Bookworm Blues continues the “Special Needs in Strange Worlds” series with articles by Teresa Frohock, Daniel Goodman, Aidan Moher, Stina Leicht and Jay Lake.