Thursday, August 27, 2009

Interview with Lev Grossman

"The nerds won, and in winning, we kind of lost. I feel like there needs to be some kind of nerd splinter groups, a hardcore, fundamentalist retrenchment that can reclaim some kind of identity for nerds"

Great interview with Lev Grossman, writer of the really very good indeed 'The Magicians over at The AV Club

Anyone with the faintest interest in writing that's as much about fantasy as it's in the genre of fantasy (see also: Robert Holdstock's 'Mythago Wood', Michael Swanwick's 'The Iron Dragon's Daughter' and John Crowley's astonishing 'Little, Big'), should check out 'The Magicians' right away, best work of fiction I've read for a long time, and I'm not just saying that because of the Dungeons and Dragons bits near the end, although they were great. If I still worked in a bookshop I'd be pushing it to people as 'The Secret History meets Narnia', which is a bit reductive, but not a million miles off.

2 comments:

worm said...

I'm a fantasy atheist, but for some reason or another I read Mythago Wood as a 13 year old, and found it to be excellent.

There, I feel better now I've got that off my chest.

Oli said...

Oh, that sounds veeery exciting...(the quick bookshop pitch, not the previous comment. Not that there was anything wrong with the previous comment.)