lev grossman the magicians books in order

And just in case you still don’t get it, he drops allusions to these works throughout, from specific (Rowling’s 'muggles,' for instance) to structural (boy-wizard trope, Lewis’s Narnia). If the references to a school for magic and a mystical land didn’t already tip you off, Grossman’s trilogy plays as an epic riff on the entire genre. But with Grossman, the comparison is even more unavoidable than usual. White, Le Guin, Feist, Pratchett, Pullman, Alan Moore, and so on, as well as some notable non-fantasists, like the great Evelyn Waugh). Rowling, and just about every other fantasist who ever was (T. It was literally called 'A Short Cut to Mushrooms.' Silly hobbits.Ī comparison to Tolkien is inevitable for any fantasy writer-as is a comparison to C. Compare this to, say, Tolkien, who once devoted a whole chapter to finding mushrooms. Much later, another character rebuilds a dying land in eight paragraphs. So you see, it is possible.) There’s a scene in the first half of The Magician’s Land where a senior at the Brakebills school for magic goes down a wrong corridor and travels to other times and dimensions, encounters a demon in a mirror, trips multiple alarms, and gets herself expelled-all in a dozen pages.

(Contemporaries, observe: All three Magicians books tap out at around 400 pages. He can weave more swords and sorcery into a few pages than some writers can into a whole goddamn thousand-page book. Grossman, who works by day as the book critic for Time magazine, is enormously talented. But a conclusion to what, exactly? Is the saga a truly great, timeless classic, worthy of shelf space alongside the masters? They! The ancient beings who live underground and make these sorts of proclamations.) That first part is hard to dispute-it is a pretty perfect conclusion. What are we to make of Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy? Its final installment, The Magician’s Land, came out in August, and reviews glowed bright, almost embarrassingly so: They’re calling it the perfect conclusion to one of the great fantasy series of our time.

Lev grossman the magicians books in order