The Bright Sword is out July 16 from Viking. The Bright Sword is out July 16 from Viking. 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 another universe. It became a best seller, and the reviews were giddy. Two more successful books in the series followed; Hollywood adapted the trilogy into a hit TV show on Syfy.
Grossman asserted his place as an important stakeholder in genre fiction, helping move it from the margins of publishing to where it is now — the 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 burn.
