News
February 27, 2010
OK, now it's February. Here are some things that have happened since October 23:
-- The Magicians won an Alex Award.
-- I proposed an idea for a sequel to The Magicians to my publisher, Viking, and they bought it. It will be called The Magician King. I'm really excited about it. I've never had a publisher buy a book from me before the actual writing of said book -- so for example I spent 5 years writing The Magicians without any particular reassurance from the universe that anybody but me would ever read it. For a publisher to commit to buying the book in advance is a big deal. It takes a lot of pressure off.
Of course Viking has also given me a deadline, which is interesting. I've never had one of those before either. They said August. I said October. They said OK. But there was a thought balloon over their head(s) that read "actually we really still mean August." ETA in bookstores: late summer 2011.
-- The paperback of The Magicians is coming out in May. With it comes another book tour. I don't know all the details yet, but it'll start at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and will include stops in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Phoenix, Minnesota, New York City, Miami, Austin and Washington DC. I'm really hoping to make each of the events kind of special -- when I toured last fall I was still pretty freaked out to be in front of an audience, so hopefully I will not look as traumatized on stage as I did on the last outing. I've written a new piece just for readings, set in the Magicians-verse but not available in stores! as the TV ads used to say.
Also I'm planning on doing more post-reading drinking this time. So there's that. The schedule is pretty close to being firm, and I'll post it in Events as soon as I can.
-- More good news associated with the paperback: I'll be fixing typos and continuity errors! So far all those who've pointed out that they couldn't have driven from the house upstate to Albany and back in the time allotted, if the house is -- as I clearly imply -- west of the Adirondacks, know this: I've got it totally under control.
-- Sometimes people point out to me that although The Magicians gets some good reviews, it also gets its share of hate as well, and what's up with that? I've looked into this, and I think I've figured it out. See, sometimes demons ascend from a lower realm to this one, possess a human and devour him or her from within, like some hideous larval parasite, leaving behind a hollow, ambulatory man-rind in that person's place, a humanoid mockery of all that is good and true. Those demons then head straight for a keyboard and review The Magicians online. And some of those demons have really crap taste in books. So I hope that clears that up.
October 23, 2009
As you can tell from the slackening pace of these updates, we have entered the long and relatively news-free period in between books. Right now most of my energy is focused on an idea for a sequel to
The Magicians, about which I've probably already said too much. And there are some related projects, ditto.
So some final notes. I don't want to leave this review of The Magicians on Boing Boing unlinked, because it's one of my favorite things anyone has written about the book. That it was written by Cory Doctorow, a person I admire a lot, makes me almost painfully proud and happy. Also I want to mention an event I'm doing at The Knitting Factory on November 8. It's the kickoff of the Largehearted Boy reading series. It's a great space, and a great series, and there will be music at it, which will make it funner. It's also probably the last event I'll do in New York City this year.
And here's something exciting. Exciting for me that is: over the past 8 weeks, The Magicians was apparently the second-best-selling SF/F book at independent bookstores nationwide. Holy Crow.
The last thing I want to say is about e-mail. I've been getting a lot of it, coming in through here and elsewhere. And I'm so grateful for it. When it started, I swore to myself that I would answer all of it, but it turns out I just can't. I never thought I would have this problem, but there's just too much. If I answered it all, then answering e-mail would be all I did. I'm really sorry.
August 29, 2009
OK, so techn-i-cally, a week down the line, The Magicians is still a New York Times bestseller. As I understand it, we came in at #16, but with an asterisk, so close enough
to #15 that they're calling it a tie and sticking us on the main list. That's not how it looks on the website (where we're just #16, no asterisk), but I've seen a PDF of
the page that's going to be in the paper, and that's how it is on there. So that's my story. I'm sticking to it.
Hmmmmm ... what else. There's an interview with me in the Onion AV Club. I was a bit what journalists call
"loose" in that one. More obscenities than usual. But I don't think I said anything I didn't mean. It got
me name-checked by Choire Sicha, so all is right with the world. There's also an interview that ran in the New Yorker's book blog, where I discuss
my literary cock-blocking by Jonathan Safran Foer. Real Grossman
completists can check out the supplemental post featuring a picture of my writing desk.
August 24, 2009
The Magicians also turns up on some other lesser (but still very cool) bestseller lists: Publishers Weekly, the Washington Post (we're number 6!),
and the Wall Street Journal.
One more thing: the New Yorker ran a really nice short review in Briefly Noted. It's here. In our house when I was
growing up the New Yorker was always the magazine of record, so that nod means a lot to me. It almost makes up for their having rejected me for a fact-checking job 13 years ago.
August 18, 2009
What else? I can see into the future -- since I'm at the height of my powers -- so I know that Details will call The Magicians "enthralling and mature" in its September issue, thus making
it sound like a sexy cougar. Grrrowl! The Examiner says things about The Magicians that I wouldn't even dare think myself, let alone say. And USA Today stuck a classic poison-pen headline over a review that wasn't that bad. No link for them.
Also I want to say something about the blog reaction to The Magicians. It has been amazing. Really, really amazing. I am not a famous author, so the amount of attention --
good and bad, but mostly good -- being paid to the book is ... I can't describe it. It makes me so happy. See for example Worlds in a Grain of Sand, Mabfan's Musings, The Book Studio, Strange Ink, and so on. I haven't been linking to
blogs much, partly because the volume of coverage has been large and hard to sift through, and partly because -- I'm being honest here -- I have a really hard time reading coverage of The Magicians, and so I mostly
stick to reading stuff that has been pre-approved for me as non-painful by other people, and nobody is filtering my blogs coverage for me. I will read it, all of it. But not till I'm done with my tour and can have a proper nervous breakdown.
August 15, 2009
They sent a photographer to my house to do the picture. We did a long photoshoot, much of which had me sitting in a toy boat that belongs to my daughter. I got really into the toy boat. I feel I really worked the boat. But in the end they ran one of me sitting on an ottoman instead.
August 12, 2009
Also, for one of the most probing, rigorous investigations
of The Magicians that it is ever likely to undergo, take a look at John Granger's take at HogwartsProfessor.com.
August 11, 2009
August 6, 2009
We had a book party for The Magicians last night. If you're curious you can read about it in this very nice piece in The Observer. I feel like a socialite!
August 4, 2009
Now that I'm back from the tour, I have a second to post the big news, which is no longer as newsy as it was when it actually happened: The Magicians will make its first
appearance next week on the New York Times bestseller list. At number 9! This is a big, big breakthrough for me. Thank you to everyone
who bought the book. The list is already up here. There's even an asterisk next to it to say that I almost made it to number 8, but James Patterson pipped me at the post.
Ugh, I had hoped to update this news page more regularly. Soon the flurry of reviews will be over, and it'll be too late, and I'll wish I had. I'm in Denver
right now, flying to Chicago in a couple of hours. Which is great, because (probably not coincidentally) we just got two great
notices in the Chicago papers. The Tribune said that The Magicians "blooms with grace and wit and imaginative brio," which is one of my favorite things
anybody has said about it, and nicely put, too. (Scroll past the Julie & Julia lede, it gets there.) The Sun-Times proclaims me to be at the height
of my powers, which I've always wanted somebody to say about me. (Though it begs the question, is it all downhill from here?)
There's a profile of me in the L.A. Times this weekend. I won't -- would never -- lie to you: this is very exciting for me.
To have a major print publication do a proper profile of me, that has been a regular feature in my fantasy life for, oh, the past three decades or so. Now it's here. And it's great, a really great
piece of thinking and writing (as well it should be, since it's by Ed Park, who is both smarter than, and a better writer than, me). There's even some rather personal stuff in there, about the end of my marriage, which I've never talked about before,
and that at the time I thought might be too much. But now I'm glad I talked about it.
This being the actual week of publication, we are approaching maximum news saturation: an interview in the Village Voice, a really beautiful review in Salon,
and a piece in the Boston Globe. I'm America's media sweetheart! Plus there was an interview -- with a picture of me staring
meaningfully at nothing in the Tennis House at Prospect Park -- in AM New York.
I was at Worldcon this past weekend, so blame the news blackout on fandom. Today is the actual official on-sale date of The Magicians, so it can
now be bought in stores. If that weren't exciting enough (exciting for me, anyway), NPR will be running a piece on The Magicians tonight as part of "All Things Considered."
A very nice review of The Magicians is running in this week's Entertainment Weekly. My last book got a B from EW, and this one gets an A-, so the trend is upward. Granted, I work for
Time magazine, which is owned by the same company that owns EW. But I choose to believe that there is no corruption involved in this review.
I have to put up a link to this essay in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine by Elizabeth Hand, which I would recommend reading even if it contained no Magicians-related content whatsoever. It's about my book (which emerges praised but not unscathed), Ursula La Guin's Cheek by Jowl, and Laura Miller's
The Magician's Book, but it also manages to be a brilliant summary of the state of the fantasy genre and its increasingly crowded creative space:
It is this singular, once-in-a-lifetime, take-your-breath-away grace note that seems absent from much contemporary fantasy. Not because it's badly written -- there may be more well-written fantasy around today than ever, perhaps due to the proliferation not just of university writing programs but of independent science fiction and fantasy writing programs such as Clarion and Odyssey -- but because the self-referential, recursive nature of so much contemporary fantasy literature has made it increasingly difficult for a writer to deliver that grace note, without it sounding like it's been already been winded on someone else's ivory horn. Our marvels have grown commonplace. Fairy fruit's available at Costco now, and Whole Foods."
Strike that, I would recommend reading this essay, even if it contained no fantasy-related content whatsoever, just as an example of the critic's art.
August 2, 2009
The Seattle Times posted a lovely review by their movie critic, who has the gloriously Hibernian name of Moira Macdonald:
Grossman skillfully moves us through four years of school and a postgraduate adventure, never letting the pace slacken. And he understands something quite moving about the uncertainties of young adulthood (the problem with growing up, notes Quentin, is that "once you're grown up, people who aren't grown up aren't fun any more") and about the isolation inherent in being different. When the students leave school, they return to a Manhattan seemingly without a place for them, carrying a bagful of skills that conjure up everything but happiness."Well, it's not the most quotable review ever. But it's good, I promise.
August 1, 2009
All right, now that major U.S. reviews are coming in, I'm going to start sticking them up here. Today there was a beautiful one in the Washington Post (by Keith Donohue, no mean novelist himself) that just nailed everything I'm proud of about The Magicians. It's here:
"The Magicians" is a great fairy tale, written for grown-ups but appealing to our most basic desires for stories to bring about some re-enchantment with the world, where monsters lurk but where a young man with a little magic may prevail."This is the first review in a "major" U.S. paper, whatever that means. And it's good. Relief.
July 31, 2009
I also want to mention -- because why stop now? plus I'm remembering how to do HTML, and I may forget again at any moment -- a review that ran in the Times, the London one, of the English edition of The Magicians:
Perfect holiday reading for me is an intelligent, literary fantasy to transport me to another world, the way books by E. Nesbit and T. H. White did when I was a child, or as the Harry Potter saga did for my daughter. But the magic of J. K. Rowling's books didn't work for me. It wasn't the plot I was too old for, but the approach and style, as I discovered when I read The Magicians by Lev Grossman. This is my ideal escapist fantasy read, a Harry Potter book for grown-ups."
July 30, 2009
A quick omnibus post to mention some good things that have happened to The Magicians. Because if I can't tell you, random browser, whom can I tell? It's an Indie Next pick (yeah, yeah -- scroll down a little, it's there). It's also an Amazon Best of August pick (ditto). O and GQ gave it good reviews (well, the GQ one was more like a mention. But a good mention -- "like doing peyote buttons with J.K. Rowling." Presumably with less vomiting.) And the Denver Times ran a truly truly remarkable review, by Ron Fortier, which I have to quote the first paragraph of:
Long ago, while in high school, I read two coming-of-age novels that stayed with me for the rest of my life. Both were as different as books could possibly be. One was an assignment, the other of my own choosing. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee and THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger brilliant captured the obscene vulnerability of youth and the horrors of adulthood as played out against two different settings; on an urban maze of loneliness, the other a southern community filled with backwoods racism. Since reading those two books, I'd not found another voice so rich in describing the adventure and confusion that is growing up in America until now. THE MAGICIAN, like those earlier books, tells that same journey; only its route is one of magic and fantasy.""The obscene vulnerability of youth." I will end up stealing that phrase somewhere.
