While I was traveling last week I was lugging around an incredibly fascinating book called The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom. Dirac was one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics. He predicted the existence of anti-matter, mathematically, before there was any experimental basis for it. He won [...]
The man who’s famous for coming back from the dead has just come back from the dead. And no, he didn’t bring back a tablet with him. Of course it was more fun to talk about the resurrection of Steve Jobs when you were talking metaphorically, about his coming back in triumph after the firing [...]
Let’s all kill time before the Apple event … 1. I Am a Dark Elf. Sometimes readers e-mail me random links to things they’ve written. They are sometimes good and sometimes bad. But I don’t often get sent something as interesting as this essay by a Muslim immigrant, born in Pakistan, about how Drizzt Do’Urden, [...]
Just pointers to two things that I wrote, which are not unrelated. The first is a piece about the Hunger Games books, the first of which came out from Scholastic last fall. There was a lot of buzz about them, and I picked the first one up … and then put it down again. It [...]
John Granger writes rigorous but accessible literary criticism about Harry Potter. He’s written four books on the subject so far, most recently Harry Potter’s Bookshelf: The Great Books Behind the Hogwarts Adventures, and he blogs at HogwartsProfessor.com. He is, basically, the scholar that I set out to become but never did. When I met John [...]
OK, I totally need to do a new post, because the last one is growing comments in this weird, tumorous way that made me think it might become sentient shortly.
My phone broke the other day. And when I say it broke I mean I broke it. I had had a piece of good news, I went out and celebrated, I drank a lot. (Pro tip: if you are not James Bond, do not order a “vesper.”) Then I took a bath. My phone took [...]
Hey Lev Grossman, you’re a big rock star. You spend weeks on the road, cruising from juke joints to road houses to small independent bookstores, reading your work to literally dozens of listless, distracted fans. The pressure must be intense, man. How do you keep your head together?
I’m on vacation. Sort of — I’m touring to promote my book. I thought I might be able to keep up posting while I was on the road, but it doesn’t seem to be happening. Sorry about that. I’ll be back on Monday.
I blog this morning from Cambridge, Mass., where I am sitting in the living room of my parents’ apartment. Something about being here automatically regresses me to the emotional age of about 13. A time when there were no blogs.
So anyway, I wrote a book called The Magicians. I’ve been trying to decide whether or not to post about it, because it seems weird to do it, and it seems weird to ignore it. But since the book is out this week, and I’m a whore for publicity, I figure I might as well [...]
