Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman is an American novelist and journalist, notably the author of the novels Warp, Codex, The Magicians, The Magician King, and The Magician's Land. He is a senior writer and book critic for TIME...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth26 June 1969
CountryUnited States of America
healthy world way
Escapism has value, even if I don't know what its value is, exactly. Maybe it's just part of some healthy way that we deal with the world.
real world horrible
The real world is horrible.
strong pain world
A magician is strong because he feels the pain between what the world is and what he would make of it.
mind magic world
Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.
other-worlds contentment obsessed
You're all so obsessed with other worlds, you're so convinced that this one is crap and everywhere else is great, but you've never bothered to figure out what's going on here!
expectations way world
That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.
course grad school took
I'm not a Dickens guy. In grad school I had to take at least one course on the Victorians, so I took The Later Dickens, because that was what there was.
good particular
What surprised me about 'The Casual Vacancy' was not just how good it was, but the particular way in which it was good.
bubble claimed fact inside key languages learn life literally several speak spent though trapped trying
Even though I have spent literally years of my life trying to learn another language, any other language - and even though I have in the past claimed in several key professional contexts that I speak other languages - I am in fact still trapped inside the bubble of English.
burning drowned plenty relatively
I've read plenty of J.G. Ballard, but I'm not really a Ballardian. I've met Ballardians, and I know when I can't compete. I like Ballard in his relatively unchallenging apocalyptic mode: 'Vermilion Sands,' 'The Drowned World,' 'The Burning World,' 'The Crystal World.'
hours known spent work
I have spent many, many hours reading J.K. Rowling's work. I am a known 'Harry Potter' fan.
low medium novel novels seems vast
It seems to me that the novel as a medium has a very low signal-to-noise ratio. By which I mean: there are a lot of novels published, but the vast majority of them don't represent major contributions to the medium.
books erased graduated job notes passages people sent year
The year after I graduated college I had a job in a library. When people underlined passages in the library books, or made notes in the margins, the books were sent to me. I erased the lines and the notes. Yes, that was my job.
both casual crashing distorting high low open possible pretending
It's not really possible to open 'The Casual Vacancy' without a lot of expectations both high and low crashing around in your brain and distorting your vision. There's no point pretending they're not there.