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 …
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.
So I will merely call out for you the birth of two new stars that have brightened the firmament of nerd culture. The first is a new episode of The Legend of Neil, which if you …
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 a bath too.
My phone was an LG Chocolate, a model that enjoyed a brief shining …
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’ll tell you: Enigmo.
Enigmo is an iPhone game …
Three important screenwriters died recently. Which writer’s work will have the greatest impact on the future of movie-making?
A) Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront)
B) John Hughes (Ferris Beuller’s Day Off)
C) Blake Snyder (Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot)
The answer, in the pattern of how these things always go, is C) Blake …
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.
p.s. just saw that there were questions in the comment thread for The Post About the Book. Answering now.
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.
As a consequence of this — and of the fact that I have to go and rock a local radio interview in about 15 …
If this Slate piece is true, it’s the best explanation yet for why old media is dying—and it’s not that you dead beats don’t want to pay for it.
It turns out that our brains are wired in such a way that it’s better to look for stuff than to actually find it. Dopamine, again!
Newspapers and magazines used to provide a …
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 do one post. What’s the worst that could happen?
I started The …
Worldcon is the World Science Fiction Convention. It happens every year. It has happened 67 times so far. This year it happened in a convention center in downtown Montreal.
It’s a big event — 4,000 people or so. Not Comic-con big, but big. The convention center itself was huge, I must have walked its length and breadth like 30 …
Next week Time is going to run a piece about District 9. I won’t be writing it, because I’m not a movie critic. But I did have a chat with the director, Neill Blomkamp, and the piece will be using quotes from that conversation.
I was going to chop the interview down into manageable bits and post it here, and I did chop it down some, …
I’m just going to blog when and where I can while I’m in Montreal. Hit targets of opportunity and hit’em hard. Like back when I was in the space rangers.
I just got out of a really interesting panel on intellectual property, featuring Cory Doctorow and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, among others. First they explained how copyright law is so …