Lev Grossman Takes His Time

The best-selling author of The Magicians trilogy is back with his first book for adults in ten years, The Bright Sword. All it took to finish was a transpacific move.

- CHOIRE SICHA

BY MOST METRICS, the author Lev Grossman's life appeared >> to change irrevocably in 2009. After publishing two books in relative obscurity, he released The Magicians, a novel about troubled kids who get invited to a magic school and fall backward into financial center of the book world. By 2016, he was happily married with three children and had at last quit his magazine job to write full time. Grossman also announced he was feeling confident about his newest novel. It would revisit King Arthur's England.

Eight years later, that book, The Bright Sword, is finally here. "Books, they fight dirty," Grossman tells me at one of his old haunts, Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, in late June. "You never know where the resistance is coming from." He's in the U.S. with his family on a promotion tour and victory lap (they live in Australia). They've rented out their house in Clinton Hill, but fortunately the tenants are away for the summer, handily leaving it furnished for them.

Grossman left the city, his home of 26 years, in September 2022. "I think I burned out a little on New York and Brooklyn," he says. He moved for a variety of reasons-raising children is difficult here, and his wife, an English professor who was at Princeton, is Australian (she's now teaching at the University of Sydney).

"It would probably be incorrect to say that I moved to Sydney because I was really stuck on my novel, but it was in there a little bit," he says. "A little bit like, I've tried everything else; now we will change hemispheres and see if it gets any better."" He's used to a certain degree of struggle when it comes to his writing. "Keep in mind that The Magicians was my first hit, and that came when I was 40," Grossman says. "I previously had two flops. If I had then two more flops? I've got three kids; they've got to eat. I had to sort of bet on myself. But it took a lot of sidestepping before I finally did."