Author Lev Grossman visited Google’s Cambridge, MA office to discuss the books in the bestselling “The Magicians Trilogy”.
“The Magicians is to Harry Potter as a shot of Irish whiskey is to a glass of weak tea. . . . Hogwarts was never like this.” — George R.R. Martin
Quentin Coldwater is a high school senior, but he’s still secretly obsessed with a series of fantasy novels he read when he was little, about the adventures of five children in a magical land called Fillory. Compared to that, everything in his real life seems gray and colorless. That changes when Quentin finds himself admitted to a very secret, very exclusive college of magic in upstate New York, where he receives a thorough and rigorous education in the practice of modern sorcery.
But magic doesn’t bring Quentin the happiness and adventure and meaning he thought it would—until he and his friends make a stunning discovery: Fillory is real. The Magicians reinterprets the grand tradition of C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling in novels for adults.
An adaptation of the series will air on Syfy in 2016.
Lev Grossman is book critic for Time Magazine and an NPR commentator. His work has appeared in the Believer, the Village Voice, the WSJ, the NYT, Salon, and Wired.