Our entry for The Great Magician King Song Contest. More details about the contest here: http://levgrossman.com/2012/05/the-great-magician-king-song-contest/ Original version of the song by Parry Gripp is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6qYuSz0R2w&list=UULNfsUeQm6zU2eBlQbEy4tw&... The Magicians and The Magician King are novels by Lev Grossman. You should read them. Continue reading →
I picked up Alice Hoffman's The Dovekeepers because I visited Masada* last fall. The novel is historical fiction following the stories of four Jewish women, where they came from, and what led them to the fortress. Also, I found the cover to be striking. Here's the thing: I should not be two thirds of the way through a book about Jews at Masada and think, "Finally! The Romans are here!" But that is what I thought, and here is why: 1. Alice Hoffman really Wants You To Know about Masada. She accomplishes this by having her first-person narrators constantly explain, "Among our people, we highly value [element of nature] because of its role in [sacred practice]." It feels like the action is interrupted by Wikipedia ... Continue reading →
(Lev Grossman writes about books here on Wednesdays. Subscribe to his RSS feed.) This post is by way of a reply to Arthur Krystal’s “Easy Writers,” a thoroughly thought-provoking piece about the relationship between genre fiction and literary fiction that ran in the New Yorker this week. I was happy to see the New Yorker weighing in on this, because I think it’s an important part of what’s going on in fiction right now. I think about it a lot. So naturally if anybody says anything about it anywhere, the world urgently requires my response. [I want to be clear, by the way, that this is a response in the sense of a (probably one-sided) critical conversation. There’s been some umbrage in the genre world ... Continue reading →