The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Lev Grossman's new novel THE BRIGHT SWORD will be on sale July 2024 The New York Times bestselling novel about a young man practicing magic in the real world, now an original series on SYFY The Magicians is to Harry Potter as a shot of Irish whiskey is to a glass of weak tea. . . . Hogwarts was never like this. --George R.R. Martin Sad, hilarious, beautiful, and essential to anyone who cares about modern fantasy. --Joe Hill A very knowing and wonderful take on the wizard school genre. --John Green The Magicians may just be the most subversive, gripping and enchanting fantasy novel I've read this century. --Cory Doctorow This gripping novel draws on the conventions of contemporary and classic fantasy novels in order to upend them . . . an unexpectedly moving coming-of-age story. --The New Yorker The best urban fantasy in years. --A.V. Club Quentin Coldwater is brilliant but miserable. A high school math genius, he's secretly fascinated with a series of children's fantasy novels set in a magical land called Fillory, and real life is disappointing by comparison. When Quentin is unexpectedly admitted to an elite, secret college of magic, it looks like his wildest dreams have come true. But his newfound powers lead him down a rabbit hole of hedonism and disillusionment, and ultimately to the dark secret behind the story of Fillory. The land of his childhood fantasies turns out to be much darker and more dangerous than he ever could have imagined. . . . The prequel to the New York Times bestselling book The Magician King and the #1 bestseller The Magician's Land, The Magicians is one of the most daring and inventive works of literary fantasy in years. No one who has escaped into the worlds of Narnia and Harry Potter should miss this breathtaking return to the landscape of the imagination. Editorial Reviews The Magicians is to Harry Potter as a shot of Irish whiskey is to a glass of weak tea. Solidly rooted in the traditions of both fantasy and mainstream literary fiction, the novel tips its hat to Oz and Narnia as well to Harry, but don't mistake this for a children's book. Grossman's sensibilities are thoroughly adult, his narrative dark and dangerous and full of twists. Hogwarts was never like this. --George R. R. Martin, bestselling author of A Game of Thrones This gripping novel draws on the conventions of contemporary and classic fantasy novels in order to upend them, and tell a darkly cunning story about the power of imagination itself. [The Magicians is] an unexpectedly moving coming-of-age story. --The New Yorker Sad, hilarious, beautiful, and essential to anyone who cares about modern fantasy. --Joe Hill, author of Horns and Locke & Key If you like the Harry Potter books . . . you should also read Lev Grossman's Magicians series, which is a very knowing and wonderful take on the wizard school genre. --John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars Fiercely intelligent. --William Gibson, author of Neuromancer Most people will like this book. But there's a certain type of reader who will enjoy it down to the bottoms of their feet. --Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Name of the Wind Lev Grossman's novel The Magicians may just be the most subversive, gripping, and enchanting fantasy novel I've read this century. . . . Grossman is a hell of a pacer, and the book rips along, whole seasons tossed out in a single sentence, all the boring mortar ground off the bricks, so that the book comes across as a sheer, seamless face that you can't stop yourself from tumbling down once you launch yourself off the first page. This isn't just an exercise in exploring what we love about fantasy and the lies we tell ourselves about it--it's a shit-kicking, gripping, tightly plotted novel that makes you want to take the afternoon off work to finish it. --Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing Fresh and compelling. . . . 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. --Washington Post The Magicians is original . . . slyly funny. --USA Today Lev Grossman's playful fantasy novel The Magicians pays homage to a variety of sources . . . with such verve and ease that you quickly forget the references and lose yourself in the story. --O, The Oprah Magazine The novel manages a literary magic trick: it's both an enchantingly written fantasy and a moving deconstruction of enchantingly realized fantasies. --Los Angeles Times Intriguing, coming-of-age fantasy --Boston Globe (Pick of the Week) I felt like I was poppin' peyote buttons with J. K. Rowling when I was reading Lev Grossman's new novel The Magicians. . . . I couldn't put it down. --Mickey Rapkin, GQ Sly and lyrical, [The Magicians] captures the magic of childhood and the sobering years beyond. --Entertainment Weekly Through sheer storytelling grace and imaginative power, Lev Grossman [creates] an adventure that's both enthralling and mature. --Details Mixing the magic of the most beloved children's fantasy classics (from Narnia and Oz to Harry Potter and Earthsea) with the sex, excess, angst, and anticlimax of life in college and beyond, Lev Grossman's The Magicians reimagines modern-day fantasy for grown-ups. [It] breathes life into a cast of characters you want to know . . . and does what [some] claim books never really manage to do: 'get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better.' Or if not better, at least a heck of a lot more interesting. --Louisville Courier-Journal The Magicians by Lev Grossman is a very entertaining book; one of those summer page-turners that you wish went on for another six volumes. Grossman takes a good number of the best childhood fantasy books from the last seventy-five years and distills their ability to fascinate into the fan-boy mind of his protagonist, Quentin Coldwater. . . . There is no doubt that this book is inventive storytelling and Grossman is at the height of his powers. --Chicago Sun-Times Entertaining. --People An irresistible storytelling momentum makes The Magicians a great summer book, both thoughtful and enchanting. --Salon.com Grossman skillfully moves us through four years of school and a postgraduate adventure, never letting the pace slacken . . . beguiling. --Seattle Times Stirring, complex, adventurous . . . from the life of Quentin Coldwater, his slacker Park Slope Harry Potter, Lev Grossman delivers superb coming of age fantasy. --Junot Daz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao The Magicians ought to be required reading for anyone who has ever fallen in love with a fantasy series, or wished that they went to a school for wizards. Lev Grossman has written a terrific, at times almost painfully perceptive novel of the fantastic that brings to mind both Jay McInerney and J. K. Rowling. --Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen Fantasy fans can't afford to miss the darkly comic and unforgettably queasy experience of reading this book--and be glad for reality. --Booklist (Starred Review) This is a book for grown-up fans of children's fantasy and would appeal to those who loved Donna Tartt's The Secret History. Highly recommended. --Library Journal (Starred Review) Very dark and very scary, with no simple answers provided--fantasy for grown-ups, in other words, and very satisfying indeed. --Kirkus Reviews Anyone who grew up reading about magical wardrobes and unicorns and talking trees before graduating to Less Than Zero and The Secret History and Bright Lights, Big City will immediately feel right at home with this smart, beautifully written book by Lev Grossman. The Magicians is fantastic, in all senses of the word. It's strange, fanciful, extravagant, eccentric, and truly remarkable--a great story, masterfully told. --Scott Smith, bestselling author of The Ruins and A Simple Plan The Magicians is a spellbinding, fast-moving, dark fantasy book for grownups that feels like an instant classic. I read it in a niffin-blue blaze of page turning, enthralled by Grossman's verbal and imaginative wizardry, his complex characters, and, most of all, his superb, brilliant inquiry into the wondrous, dangerous world of magic. --Kate Christensen, PEN/Faulkner award winning author of The Great Man and The Epicure's Lament Remember the last time you ran home to finish a book? This is it, folks. The Magicians is the most dazzling, erudite, and thoughtful fantasy novel to date. You'll be bedazzled by the magic but also brought short by what it has to sayabout the world we live in. --Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante's Handbook The Magicians brilliantly explores the hidden underbelly of fantasy and easy magic, taking what's simple on the surface and turning it over to show us the complicated writhing mess beneath. It's like seeing the worlds of Narnia and Harry Potter through a 3-D magnifying glass. --Naomi Novik, author of His Majesty's Dragon - From the Publisher Brakebills will remind readers of Hogwarts, though with more illicit fondling. Grossman has written what could crudely be labeled a Harry Potter for adults. He takes the rudiments of that story-an alternate society of magicians bumpily coexists with our own-and injects mature themes. Quentin and his circle sleep around. They cook great meals and slosh wine. They also mope about and ponder the purpose of the magical life. It turns out that it can be kind of boring. You have great power but no meaningful way to apply it. Kind of like comp lit majors, or faded rock stars. -The New York Times - Michael Agger Grossman's novel is a postadolescent Harry Potter, following apprentices in the art of magic through their time as students at an upstate New York college to their postcollegiate Manhattan misdeeds, with jaded ennui tempering the magical aura. Mark Bramhall, a smooth baritone with a supple speaking voice, reads carefully, with a slight air of heaviness and sorrow. He pauses frequently and freights the silences with a tenderness well befitting a coming-of-age novel. A Viking hardcover (Reviews, June 1). (July) - Publishers Weekly Grossman skillfully moves us through four years of school and a postgraduate adventure, never letting the pace slacken . . . beguiling. - Seattle Times An irresistible storytelling momentum makes The Magicians a great summer book, both thoughtful and enchanting. - Salon Grossman clearly has read his Potter and much more. While this story invariably echoes a whole body of romantic coming-of-age tales, Grossman's American variation is fresh and compelling. Like a jazz musician, he riffs on Potter and Narnia, but makes it his own. - Washington Post Sly and lyrical, [The Magicians] captures the magic of childhood and the sobering years beyond. - Entertainment Weekly Most of us secretly believed as children that we were somehow destined for greatness. Someday there would be a letter delivered by owl or a magical wardrobe, and it would turn out we were the long-lost ruler of a land in eternal winter! Time magazine book critic Grossman (The Codex) explores what it might be like if this really happened. High school senior Quentin is on his way to a college interview when he wanders off the street and ends up transported to another place...where it's still summer. At first he thinks he must be in the land of Fillory, where his favorite childhood books took place, but no, he is actually at a magical college in upstate New York. He passes the entrance exam and decides to skip the rest of senior year and become a wizard instead-well, wouldn't you? In the course of his adventures, he finds out that studying magic is actually insanely difficult and that fighting a war for the royal succession of an alternate world is much less glamorous than it sounds. But this is not quite a be careful what you wish for story. Ultimately, being a magician is, in fact, awesome. This is a book for grown-up fans of children's fantasy and would also appeal to those who loved Donna Tartt's The Secret History. Highly recommended. -Jenne Bergstrom - Library Journal Grossman (Codex, 2004, etc.) imagines a sorcery school whose primary lesson seems to be that bending the world to your will isn't all it's cracked up to be. When Quentin manages to find Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy and pass its baffling entrance exam, he finally feels at home somewhere. Back in the real world, Quentin and fellow students, like brilliant, crippling shy Alice and debonair, sexually twisted Eliot, were misfits, obsessed with a famous children's series called Fillory and Further (The Chronicles of Narnia, very lightly disguised). Brakebills teaches them how to tap into the universe's flow of energy to cast spells; they're ready to graduate and . . . then what? You can do nothing or anything or everything, cautions Alice, who has become Quentin's lover. You have to find something to really care about to keep from running totally off the rails. Her warning seems apt as he indulges in aimless post-grad drinking and partying, eventually betraying Alice with two other Brakebills alums. The discovery that Fillory actually exists offers Quentin a chance to redeem himself with Alice and find a purpose for his life as well. But Fillory turns out to be an even more dangerous, anarchic place than the books suggested, and it harbors a Beast who's already made a catastrophic appearance at Brakebills. The novel's climax includes some spectacular magical battles to complement the complex emotional entanglements Grossman has deftly sketched in earlier chapters. The bottom line has nothing to do with magic at all: There's no getting away from yourself, Quentin realizes. After a dreadful loss that he discovers is the result of manipulation by forces that care nothing about himor his friends, Quentin chooses a bleak, circumscribed existence in the nonmagical world. Three of his Brakebills pals return to invite him back to Fillory: Does this promise new hope, or threaten more delusions?Very dark and very scary, with no simple answers provided-fantasy for grown-ups, in other words, and very satisfying indeed. Agent: Tina Bennett/Janklow & Nesbit - Kirkus Reviews Mark Bramhall sets up the delicate lines between reality and fantasy in the story of Quentin, a teenager from Brooklyn who is surprised to find himself at Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. Sound a lot like Harry Potter? Bramhall delivers the author's irony and allusions as he portrays a maturing, fully dimensional protagonist. Quentin is insecure at heart, prideful at times, fearful at others. He longs to change the world like the heroes from the enchanted realm of Fillory, which he read about as a boy. When Quentin discovers that Fillory is real, Bramhall distinguishes the hero's imaginings from the reality of the dark realm he finds. As Bramhall depicts this Narnia-like land, he fully portrays the heroes, villains, even the secondary characters such as the cruel mage, a drunken bear, and a timid tree person. S.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine - AUGUST 2009 - AudioFile