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• The Golden Swift ("The Silver Arrow Series" book two) Little, Brown and Company (New York, NY), 2022

1. The Golden Swift LCCN 2021062035 Type of material Book Personal name Grossman, Lev, author. Main title The Golden Swift / by Lev Grossman ; illustrated by Tracy Nishimura Bishop. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2022. Description 263 pages : illustrations ; 20 cm. ISBN 9780316283540 (hardcover) 9780316283649 (paperback) (ebook) CALL NUMBER PZ7.1.G785 Go 2022 FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Wikipedia -

  Lev Grossman

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Lev Grossman

  Grossman in 2011
  Born June 26, 1969 (age 55)
  Concord, Massachusetts, US
  Education Harvard University (BA)
  Occupations
  Novelistcriticjournalist
  Spouse Sophie Gee
  Children 3
  Parent(s) Judith Grossman (mother)
  Allen Grossman (father)
  Relatives Austin Grossman (brother)
  Bathsheba Grossman (sister)
  Website levgrossman.com
  Lev Grossman (born June 26, 1969) is an American novelist and journalist who wrote The Magicians Trilogy: The Magicians (2009), The Magician King (2011), and The Magician's Land (2014). He was the book critic and lead technology writer at Time magazine from 2002 to 2016.[1] His recent work includes the children's book The Silver Arrow and the screenplay for the film The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, based on his short story.

  Early life and education
  Grossman was born on June 26, 1969, in Concord, Massachusetts.[2] He is the twin brother of video game designer and novelist Austin Grossman, a brother of sculptor Bathsheba Grossman, and son of the poet Allen Grossman and the novelist Judith Grossman. Grossman's father was born Jewish[3] and his mother was raised Anglican,[4] but Grossman has said, "I grew up in a very unreligious household. Very. I have no religion at all. So I come at religion as about as much of an outsider as you can be in Western civilization."[5] On the assumption that he was raised Jewish, he has said, "I have this extremely old-world name, and people can invite me to as many Jewish book festivals as they want to--but I wasn't raised Jewish."[4]

  After graduating from Lexington High School, Grossman studied literature at Harvard University, graduating with a degree in literature in 1991.[6]

  Career
  Journalism
  Grossman has written for The New York Times, Wired, Salon.com, Lingua Franca, Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, The Wall Street Journal, and The Village Voice. He has served as a member of the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle and as the chair of the Fiction Awards Panel.[7] In May 2015, Grossman gave the third annual Tolkien Lecture at Pembroke College, Oxford.[8]

  In writing for Time, he has also covered the consumer electronics industry, reporting on video games, blogs, viral videos and Web comics like Penny Arcade and Achewood. In 2006, he traveled to Japan to cover the unveiling of the Wii console.[9] He has interviewed Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Salman Rushdie, Neil Gaiman, Joan Didion, Jonathan Franzen, J.K. Rowling, and Johnny Cash. He wrote one of the earliest pieces on Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series.[10] A piece written by Grossman on the game Halo 3 was criticized for casting gamers in an "unfavorable light."[11] Grossman was also the author of the Time Person of the Year 2010 feature article on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.[12]

  Grossman did some freelancing and wrote for other magazines. Some of the works he wrote at this time include "The Death of a Civil Servant," "Good Novels Don't Have to be Hard," "Catalog This," "The Gay Nabokov," "When Words Fail," and "Get Smart." He freelanced at The Believer, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Salon, Lingua Franca, and Time Digital. It was soon after this that his first novel, Warp, was published.[1]

  He quit his job at Time magazine in August 2016 to pursue writing full time.[1][13]

  Fiction
  Lev Grossman's first novel, Warp, was published in 1997, after he moved to New York City.[6] Warp was about "the lyrical misadventures of an aimless 20-something in Boston who has trouble distinguishing between reality and Star Trek."[1] It received largely negative customer reviews on Amazon.com, and in response, Grossman submitted fake reviews to Amazon using false names. He then recounted these actions in an essay titled "Terrors of the Amazon".[14] His second novel, Codex, was published in 2004 and became an international bestseller.[6]

  In an article for The New York Times Grossman wrote: "I wrote fiction for 17 years before I found out I was a fantasy novelist. Up till then I always thought I was going to write literary fiction, like Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith or Jhumpa Lahiri. But I thought wrong. ... Fantasy is sometimes dismissed as childish, or escapist, but I take what I am doing very, very seriously.[15]

  Grossman's The Magicians was published in hardcover in August 2009 and became a bestseller. The trade paperback edition was made available on May 25, 2010. The Washington Post called it "Exuberant and inventive...Fresh and compelling...a great fairy tale."[16] The book is a dark contemporary fantasy about Quentin Coldwater, an unusually gifted young man who obsesses over Fillory, the magical land of his favorite childhood books. Unexpectedly admitted to Brakebills, a secret, exclusive college of magic in upstate New York (an amalgam of Bannerman's Castle and Olana), Quentin receives an education in the craft of modern sorcery. After graduation, he and his friends discover that Fillory is real.[17] Michael Agger of The New York Times said the book "could crudely be labeled a Harry Potter for adults," injecting mature themes into fantasy literature.[18] The Magicians won the 2010 Alex Award, given to ten adult books that are appealing to young adults, and the 2011 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.[19]

  In August 2011, The Magician King, the sequel to The Magicians, was published, which returns readers to the magical land of Fillory, where Quentin and his friends are now kings and queens. The Chicago Tribune said The Magician King was "The Catcher in the Rye for devotees of alternative universes" and that "Grossman has created a rare, strange and scintillating novel."[20] It was an Editor's Choice pick of The New York Times, who called it "[A] serious, heartfelt novel [that] turns the machinery of fantasy inside out."[21] The Boston Globe said "The Magician King is a rare achievement, a book that simultaneously criticizes and celebrates our deep desire for fantasy."[22]

  The third book in the series is titled The Magician's Land[23][24] and was published on August 5, 2014.[25]

  In July 2019, Grossman, with co-writer Lilah Sturges and illustrator Pius Bak, released The Magicians: Alice's Story, a graphic novel told from the perspective of Alice, a secondary character from the book series.

  Grossman's first children's book, The Silver Arrow, was published in September 2020. It debuted on the New York Times Best Seller list on September 27, 2020.[26] The Golden Swift, its sequel, was published on May 3, 2022.

  In September 2016, Grossman announced that his next novel would be a take on King Arthur called The Bright Sword[27] and in November 2023, he revealed that the novel was done and would be out the following year.[28] In a post on his newsletter, Grossman explained that the book was a difficult project and outlined why it took nearly a decade to write, including historical research, the COVID-19 pandemic, and other projects.[29]

  The Bright Sword was published July 16, 2024 to positive reviews.[30]

  Film and television
  Grossman's Magicians trilogy was adapted for television by Sera Gamble and John McNamara for Syfy. The series received five seasons and aired from December 2015 to April 2020.

  Grossman wrote the screenplay for the film The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, based on his short story of the same name. The film was released through Amazon Prime Video on February 12, 2021.[31]

  Personal life
  Grossman lives in Sydney, Australia[32] with his wife and children.[33][34] Grossman is a self-professed atheist.[35]

  Bibliography
  Warp, New York: St. Martin's Griffin/Macmillan, 1997. ISBN 978-0-312-17059-2
  Codex, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004. ISBN 978-0-15-101066-0
  The Magicians, New York: Viking/Penguin, 2009. ISBN 978-0-670-02055-3 (hardcover); Plume/Penguin, 2010. ISBN 978-0-452-29629-9 (trade paperback)
  The Magician King, New York: Viking/Penguin, 2011. ISBN 978-0-670-02231-1
  The Magician's Land, New York: Viking/Penguin/PRH, 2014. ISBN 978-0-670-01567-2
  The Silver Arrow, Little, Brown, 2020. ISBN 978-0-316-54170-1
  The Golden Swift, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2022. ISBN 9780316283861
  The Bright Sword, Penguin Random House, 2024. ISBN 978-0-7352-2404-9
  Comics
  The Magicians: Alice's Story (graphic novel) (with Lilah Sturges), Archala, 2019. ISBN 978-1-684-15021-2
  The Magicians #1 (comic) (with Lilah Sturges), Boom! – Archaia, 2019 ASIN B07ZL5CK1F
  The Magicians #2 (comic) (with Lilah Sturges), Boom! – Archaia, 2019 ASIN B07ZL52X49
  The Magicians #3 (comic) (with Lilah Sturges), Boom! – Archaia, 2020 ASIN B083C4SLZW
  The Magicians #4 (comic) (with Lilah Sturges), Boom! – Archaia, 2020 ASIN B083C5F5TG
  Filmography
  Film and TV
  Year Title Role Notes
  2015–2020 The Magicians Series consultant TV series based on his series The Magicians
  2021 The Map of Tiny Perfect Things Screenwriter Film based on his short story Map
  TBD The Heavens Story by In development with the Russo brothers
  Other credits
  Neil Gaiman: Dream Dangerously (2016); as himself
  High Life (2018); special thanks

• Lev Grossman website - https://levgrossman.com/

  Lev Grossman is the author of eight novels including the bestseller The Bright Sword, an epic retelling of the story of King Arthur, which was a Time, Vanity Fair, Kirkus, NPR and New York Times Best Book of 2024. The Washington Post called it “a thrilling new take on Arthurian legend,” and George R.R. Martin said, “if you love King Arthur as much as I do, you’ll love Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword.”

  Grossman is also the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Magicians trilogy—The Magicians, The Magician King, and The Magician’s Land—which has been published in thirty countries and was adapted as a TV show that ran for five seasons on Syfy. Lev has written two novels for children: The Silver Arrow, a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, People, Apple and Amazon Best Book of the Year, and its sequel The Golden Swift. He also wrote the screenplay for the movie The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, which was a finalist for the Critic’s Choice awards.

  From 2002 to 2016 Lev worked as a staff writer at Time magazine, where he wrote more than 20 cover stories, and he’s also written essays and reviews for the Atlantic, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Salon, Slate, Wired, Entertainment Weekly, the Believer, the Village Voice, the Week, Buzzfeed, NPR, Lingua Franca, and many other places. He has degrees from Harvard and Yale and regularly gives talks and workshops at festivals and colleges, and he has served on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle, Electric Literature, and the Harvard Advocate. In 2018 he was the Mary Higgins Clark Chair in Creative Writing at Fordham College.

  Lev grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, the son of two English professors. His twin brother Austin is a writer and game designer, and his older sister Sheba is an artist. He lives in Brooklyn, New York but spends a lot of time in Sydney, Australia, where his wife Sophie is from. He has three children and a somehow steadily increasing number of cats.

• Vulture - https://www.vulture.com/article/lev-grossman-magicians-bright-sword-interview.html

  July 11, 2024
  Lev Grossman Takes His Time The author of The Magicians returns to adult fiction with The Bright Sword. It only took ten years and a transpacific move.
  Portrait of Choire Sicha
  By Choire Sicha, an editor at New York
  The Bright Sword is out July 16 from Viking.

  Photo: Jeff Brown
  This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

  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 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.”

  One reason The Bright Sword took so long was that Grossman initially kept his day job as a journalist. “I only ever wanted to write fiction, but I was really bad at it for a long time, so I needed to support myself. Being a journalist is what I ended up doing. But it wasn’t my childhood dream,” he says. “From the outside, it looked like I had a mid-career pivot to writing novels. I was always writing novels. It was just that people didn’t want to buy them.”

  We had begun our Brooklyn tour at Greenlight, but now Grossman has successfully navigated us to the hole-in-the-wall Kitten Café in Bed-Stuy, only second-guessing himself once to check his phone, a little sad that he’d lost the courage of his convictions. There, a man named Klever (truly; I saw his driver’s license) makes him an oat-milk cappuccino. At 55, Grossman is trim in the manner of somebody who runs a lot (which he does in Sydney) and has exchanged his formerly customary New England attire for clothes that look vaguely Swedish. He answers my questions cautiously, anxious about saying anything self-pitying or self-aggrandizing.

  He grew up in the suburbs of Boston, the youngest child of an academic-poet father and an academic-novelist mother. He got his bachelor’s degree in literature at Harvard and went to Yale for a master’s degree in comparative literature. “I was really good at getting good grades and nothing else, and it turned out to be a less useful skill in the real world than I realized,” he says. “I went back to school, started a Ph.D., did that for three years, but it was really clear that I wasn’t cut out for comparing literatures for a living or teaching or any of that stuff.”

  He moved to New York, as aspiring novelists tend to do, in 1996. He wanted to be a writer, and when he wasn’t too depressed to type, he managed to finish his first novel. Titled Warp, the book is about horny young people in Boston who are pop-culture and irony poisoned and wander around and talk. He got $6,000 for it, and it received lackluster reviews. In need of money, Grossman started applying to media jobs.

  “I remember answering an ad in the newspaper,” he says, “and it was like ‘Literary magazine seeks qualified assistant’ and I went and it was The New Yorker. They’d done a thing where they didn’t tip their hand. I went in for my interview, and I was like, I’m going to work at The New Yorker! It’s all going to be okay! And I didn’t get the job. It seemed like I’d found the thing you click on in the game where you win, but it didn’t turn out that way.”

  He did fall into media eventually, though. “I ended up working for a magazine company but not in a writing capacity. I had to look at the message boards and delete obscenity, libel, hate speech, and copyright violations.” This was how he started at Time; he also managed coders in the web division for four years before eventually becoming a book critic for the magazine. “Keep in mind one thing I had going for me was that I was clinically depressed. I did not expect happiness. I just worked away.”

  He published his second novel, Codex, a thriller of sorts, in 2004. It probably didn’t feel good at the time, but the reviews were decent and it wasn’t a financial disaster. It just didn’t open a portal, or unleash magic wishes, or fix his serotonin-reuptake issues. Sometimes you publish a book and no one really cares. But everything changed that year anyway.

  “Two things happened,” he says. “My then-wife and I had a child, which I think unlocked a lot of frozen emotions for me. I got very emotional, feeling close to this child in a way that I hadn’t felt close to anybody before. It made me want to get healthier, and so I went to therapy. That was also the year that I started writing Magicians. Everything turned on that year. I guess I should say that I realized that I was in the wrong marriage at that time also and started getting out.”

  He realized that better mental health made the writing stronger. “In our family, everybody has done some kind of writing or creative work. There’s an association of poor mental health with creativity. I think that we actually probably shared a sense that, ‘Look, this is where the art comes from.’ It turned out to be wrong. Completely wrong.”

  He also read a great book. “Another thing that happened in 2004 is I read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. That, without question, was the book where I looked at it and I thought, I’ve been doing it wrong. And then: I want to be doing this instead.” Susanna Clarke’s book is an alternate history of England with magic, one of those exceptional, near-perfect books, utterly persuasive and yet old-fashioned. The book gave him the permission to eschew the literary fiction of his early novels (“They had a chilly quality. The writing came slow and hard,” he wrote in the New York Times in 2014) and embrace the fantasy he had always loved reading as a child.

  In 2014, Grossman started kicking around the idea of a reimagining of King Arthur. “After I finished the Magicians books, I was casting about for something new to write about,” he says. He’d loved The Once and Future King since he read it in junior high. But it “had begun to feel a little dusty — not dated exactly, but somehow no longer of our time, and I wondered what it would be like to write a version of King Arthur that felt like it belonged right now.” He was thinking also about Game of Thrones — “how the engine of that story is the death of the king, which kicks off a massive succession crisis, and the whole world falls apart, and I wondered how the story would go if that king who died was King Arthur.” Those pieces came together as one. “How do people live in that dark, broken world and find hope and carry on? That felt very real to me and very urgent. Because that world feels a lot like our world.” On the surface, The Bright Sword is a straightforward Arthurian tale — a boy named Collum comes to Camelot and wants to be a knight. But there’s bad news: King Arthur is dead. Most of the Round Table is dead or missing, too. Merlin is trapped under a hill. The survivors are entrusted to pick up the pieces of Britain and find a new king for the country. This makes it sound like a musty faux-historical novel, but actually it’s a super-weird, messy fantasy book with swords and faeries and other dimensions. While writing, Grossman put up giant maps of post-Roman England that then promptly fell down. Enormous Australian mosquitoes circled around him in his very bare office, a basement room equipped with a trestle table next to the laundry room. But he finished the book and it’s already in development for a TV series.

  Now back in Brooklyn for the book tour, he’s feeling a bit nostalgic. He got on the troubled G train for the first time in ages.

  “We got to Myrtle-Willoughby, and I was like, Oh my God, my old stop. I can’t believe I spent so much time here,” he says. “The tears were starting to come.” A few stops later, he arrived at Clinton-Washington, which is actually where his place is. “I don’t know what I was getting so upset about. I’ve lost it if I’m getting choked up at Myrtle-Willoughby.”

  As to the question of why the book took so long to write, eventually he tells me he thinks it has something to do with writing the interior lives of so many different characters. “I was struggling with the voice of it. Some of them, it was easy, easy for them to talk, and others didn’t really want to talk in the way that I felt like they should. And I think there was just a lot of stuff in this story, things that I had carefully avoided while writing The Magicians, anyway.”

  Such as? “We don’t get into marriage in The Magicians. People get married, but we don’t go into their marriage in an interesting way. There’s very little stuff about parents and children, and Arthur is all about fathers and sons.” Maybe he’s just growing up: “I guess I needed to stretch my writing talent a bit and it took a while.”

• The Federal - https://thefederal.com/category/features/lev-grossman-interview-fantasy-is-the-language-of-the-unconscious-the-dreams-101933

  Lev Grossman interview: Fantasy is the language of the unconscious, the dreams Lev Grossman's much-a

  https://thefederal.com/category/features/lev-grossman-interview-fantasy-is-the-language-of-the-unconscious-the-dreams-101933

• United by Pop - https://www.unitedbypop.com/books/author-interviews/lev-grossman-bright-sword/

  Lev Grossman on his version of King Arthur in the Bright Sword
  "For me that meant finding the aspects of Arthur's world, the world of 6th century Britain, that resonate with ours. And there are a lot. "
  By Tacye On Jul 18, 2024
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  Lev Grossman penned the No. 1 bestselling Magicians trilogy, and he’s now back with The Bright Sword, an Arthurian legend-retelling. The literature world has gifted us many Arthurian legend-retelling recently The Bright Sword tells the story of a fallen Round Table, where survivors aren’t the heroes, but oddballs. Today, we are honoured to have Lev Grossman here to chat about why it is the right time for the world to meet The Bright Sword, and why he chose to shine a light on oddballs.

  You have worked on this on and off for years. Why do you think now is the right time for the world to read The Bright Sword?

  Almost the whole challenge of writing The Bright Sword was trying to produce a version of King Arthur that somehow met the present moment. For me that meant finding the aspects of Arthur’s world, the world of 6th century Britain, that resonate with ours. And there are a lot. It was a time of vast migrations, of refugees and immigrants seeking new homes. People were dealing with the aftermath of empire and histories of violence, just like we are; Arthur—the son of a Christian Roman king and a pagan Celtic duchess, the colonizer and the colonized—was right in the middle of all that.

  This makes it sound like I’m trying to make a point with The Bright Sword, which I’m really not. It’s just supposed to be a fun compelling story. But it’s only going to be fun and compelling if it matters to us where we are right now.

  Do you still remember the first time you learned about King Arthur? Which book was it and which part was the most fascinating to you?

  It was almost certainly The Sword in the Stone, by T.H. White. Of course the part I remember loving was mostly the stuff about Arthur being transformed into various animals by Merlin. Which was supposed to be about Arthur learning important lessons about how to be a good king, but at the time I think I just liked the animals.

  And when retelling the legend in The Bright Sword, was it easy to decide what you want to keep?

  Not easy exactly, but I definitely had a vision to guide me. We’ve seen a lot of gritty, historically grounded Arthurs lately, and I knew I wanted to go the other way—I wanted to lean into the magic and romance of it all, the shining armor, the swordplay, the marvels, the angels. If it glowed or sparkled or had wings, I kept it.

  In fact, how do you decide when to keep things historically accurate, and to blend in some fantasy?

  It was probably more the other way around, writing a cracking good fantasy and then blending in historical elements to keep it grounded and real. My version of Arthur is basically the one we all know, the medieval one, the 12th century Arthur, which was never very faithful to Arthur’s early-medieval 6th century origins. 6th century Arthur didn’t have plate armor or castles or tournaments. But the 12th century writers either didn’t know or didn’t care.

  But you need a lot of historical detail in there to make things feel real and solid, and in that way I tried to be faithful to the 12th century period as much as possible, except when it came to magic, or when there was something really shiny and cool that was slightly out-of-period. Like some of the armor and weapons—I gave a lot of the knights fancy 15th or 16th century armor, just because it’s so gorgeous.

  The characters in The Bright Sword are all written beautifully. Why did you decide to present some of their backstories in separate chapters?

  Partly I just wanted to use a traditional period device—I was trying to borrow from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. I think it connects the book to medieval storytelling traditions.

  But also I wanted to have a lot of The Bright Sword take place in Arthur’s time, even though it’s nominally set after Arthur’s death. I wanted to spend some time reveling in the golden age of Arthur. I was inspired by Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven—I love the structure of that book, the way it’s a post-apocalyptic novel that moves back and forth between moments before and after the apocalypse.

  And why is it so important that they need to be oddballs?

  The legend of Arthur has been around a long time—1400 years, give or take. So if I was going to tell it again, I wanted to look for stories that hadn’t been told before, and that meant looking in the margins for the kinds of characters who don’t usually get to take center stage. Women, people of color, gay people, trans people, mentally ill people. These are voices we don’t usually get to hear from in Arthurian literature. It’s time!

  Finally, most retellings these days are feminist retellings of classics, to the point that books “need” to be feminist retellings to be trending. How would you persuade readers to give The Bright Sword a chance?

  I do actually think of The Bright Sword as a feminist retelling! Three of the main characters—Nimue, Guinevere, and Morgan le Fay—are women who are almost always depicted as either evil or weak or both. In this book they are neither.

  But if I’m making a sales pitch, The Bright Sword does actually have a lot of trendy tropes. It’s a big found family book. There’s some friends to lovers, some enemies to lovers, some slow burn. And there’s lots of fairies! But most of all I think at heart it’s a post-apocalypse book. Most books about King Arthur end with his death; this one is about what happens after. It’s about a world where the unthinkable has happened—the center has failed, the sun has gone out, and everything has fallen apart. I wanted to look at how people live in that world. Because that world is our world.

  The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman is out July 16. (Del Rey UK)

• f(r)iction - https://frictionlit.org/an-interview-with-lev-grossman/?srsltid=AfmBOoq81y0zW8qXgTLw6D6Kz8uZQfyar5RYMIxGunkywbYu2b-vqSq3

  An Interview with Lev Grossman
  Words By Lev Grossman, Interviewed by Dani Hedlund
  Dani Hedlund: Okay, most cliché question on the planet: Lev, where did the inspiration for your new book, The Silver Arrow, come from?

  Lev Grossman: I never know where it comes from until people ask me and I’m standing in front of an audience and suddenly it hits me. I think this book started with T. S. Elliot and Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat. There is an incredible description of the railway car that Skimbleshanks takes. It has this little basin and this little fan and you sort of snuggle down in your little nest. That gave rise to this image of a young girl on a train moving through a nighttime landscape. She’s looking out the window in this plush sleeper car that she’s in, and there’s no one else on the train.

  What was it like transitioning from your very serious novels and sex-drenched magicians to a children’s book?

  It wasn’t as big a deal as you would think because when I wrote The Magicians I could actually still remember what it was like to be in my twenties, to be single, and drinking all the time. My life has moved farther away from that world. And now I spend a lot of my time—especially in quarantine—being a dad and using that dad voice. So this is much closer to my world now than The Magicians is, and it feels very natural. I tell stories to my children. I was ready to write a book for kids.

  I found it interesting that this voice interjects to teach the kids valuable things. What was it like to balance the plot with these miniature lessons?

  The lessons that children need to learn turn out to be the lessons that adults need to learn. It’s not any different. We just spend our whole lives learning these particular lessons about being responsible and having empathy and things like that. You want to write the book that you wish you’d read as a child. And you always remember the bits in the books where the author imparted the parental wisdom because those parts sucked. You didn’t feel it or absorb it because it was so boring. So even though I wanted stuff like that to be in this book, I tried to incorporate it in such a way that maybe readers would feel beyond just hearing my voice and feeling like I was teaching a lesson. Nobody likes lessons, but you can’t get around them.

  I’ve got to ask: did you just know everything about nearly-extinct animals, or was this a lot of research?

  I did do a lot of research about animals, and about trains, once I had zeroed in on certain animals that were part of the dramatis personae. The internet is not always a great place to be, but it was great for really granular information about animals.

  Was there equally good information about trains?

  I don’t know how current a member of the steamer train community you are on the internet, but there is always someone who knows ten times as much about steam trains as you. They didn’t have computers back then, so they had to nerd out on something and they nerded out on steam trains. It’s unbelievable how complex those things are—they’re really magnificent.

  There is a conservation aspect to this book. Where did that come from? Where did the image of this young girl looking out at this plush land from the train move into this other angle?

  The short answer is, I couldn’t get around it. I definitely didn’t set out to write some sort of ecological, political screed. But I was picturing this girl on the train, and where the train is going. Several months later, I saw the train going through a forest and I saw the light up ahead—it was all very Narnian. The train reached a station in the middle of the forest and there were animals waiting for it. And what do the animals say? What do they talk about? And it’s not Mr. and Mrs. Beaver. The animals, they have very complicated feelings. It’s not like, “the humans have come to save the day, hooray, at last they’re here.” The humans have been destroying the world. And now the animals have the chance to actually talk to the humans and they have a lot to say about what’s going on. I was trying to imagine that conversation. What else would they talk about? It’s the elephant in the room and sooner or later it’s got to come out.

  The section where the animals have something to say about that was miraculous. It could have been preachy and self-righteous, and instead, it felt really empowering.

  There was a lot of feeling that went into the message. I still, to this day, cannot read it aloud. I can’t read parts of it out loud because I get too emotional.

  That section felt so human, so honest in a way that we don’t see anymore. I’m really impressed with how you pulled it off.

  I was writing it while trying to imagine someone reading it who doesn’t believe climate change is real, someone who is offended and angered by the suggestion that it’s real. There are millions of people who feel that way and I know I lost them when I started with pulling a polar bear out of the water. They already know that this book is coming, so they’ve stopped reading. But just on the off chance that one of them was still reading, I tried to write it in such a way that maybe they wouldn’t hurl the book across the room.

  My COO was in marine conservation before she came to us, and she’s really invested in whether the next book is going to be underwater. Is it?

  It’s definitely going to have underwater bits. I can’t leave the trains behind, but I promised a submarine and a submarine I will deliver.

  Did you have any idea that this was going to be more than one book when you started?

  I didn’t even have the idea that it was going to be one book. I’ve never started writing a novel without the feeling that I was a complete idiot doing something completely stupid. You guys were among the first to read the chapter of The Silver Arrow when it was in the magazine—it was very early on and I hadn’t even sold it to a publisher. I wasn’t sure that it was going to be a book; I wasn’t thinking about sequels at all. When Little Brown bought it, they actually suggested a series deal. But I sold it as one book. Yet now I feel like it could have a sequel. Writing sequels has to be because I can’t stop myself, not because I committed to it.

  Do you feel more comfortable jumping into this universe than the universe of The Magicians? Are you going to be committed to this for a similar amount of time?

  The two universes feel so different. In The Magicians there were a lot of “proxy me’s” in that universe. I felt like I had one foot in it. I actually don’t have any feet in The Silver Arrow universe. There’s not really a version of me in it. So my relationship with it feels different, though I don’t love it any less.

  It’s interesting to me that you feel a stronger emotional connection reading out loud the book that you have not put yourself in.

  Yeah. I think it’s probably because my children are in it. You really love your kids all the way, no matter what your feelings about yourself are. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to love those characters—because I’m not in it.

  Do you feel a different relationship with your writing now that you have kids—this other form of legacy?

  I spent a lot of time as a failed writer. I think I have still spent more time as a failed writer than as a successful writer. And it wasn’t until I had children—what I imagined would be the end of my writing career—that I really began to connect with what I was writing and get something onto the page that felt authentic. Having children completely saved my writing career, because before I had them, I hadn’t really found my voice.

  That’s really interesting. Why do you think they’re connected?

  I was one of those people who kept a lot of emotions bottled up inside. A lot of emotions come out when you have a child. You think about your own childhood, what you were like, and you think of your parents much more because you are a parent now. You just start connecting with stuff that was frozen inside you. Writing is good for that, and having children is also very good for that. There were a lot of emotions I had been avoiding. When they came out, they got onto the page and made my writing feel more honest and deeper. People liked it more. I liked it more.

  How are you balancing writing all of these books with every other thing you do? Like raising a family, writing screenplays, and not going to Comic-Cons. Are you still spinning many plates?

  It’s awkward and ungraceful. This is my first book in a long time. The final Magicians book was published in 2014 and that was my last book before this. I had a lot of slow-rolling projects that were going on and on, in parallel, and now they are all coming to a head at the same time. In the middle-grade world, if you do a series, you’re really supposed to do one per year, and there’s no way I’m going to get anywhere near that. Because I have a movie coming out and I owe a young adult novel, and then I can work on the next Silver Arrow book. It’s not a graceful balancing act.

  Well, what are you most excited about that’s coming out in the next couple of years?

  The movie will be amazing, not because it’s an amazing movie, but because I actually wrote a movie! I can’t believe it. Then I have this book I’ve been working on for six years, which I’m very ready to have out there. It would be lovely to have another adult novel out there. I’m also working on a TV pilot. It’s a long shot that it will ever get made, but if it does happen it will be really cool. It’s like a space opera, and it would be really fun to do that.

  I wish I could send this interview transcript back twenty years to show you what your life would look like.

  It had been a long time since I had a book come out, and I forgot how intense the highs and lows are. I’d forgotten how sensitive I can be to criticism. Then I remembered I used to feel like that all the time. But I don’t think, hopefully, I’ll ever have to go back to that.

  Whenever I feel bad about criticism, I go back to my favorite books on GoodReads. People leave the most horrible reviews. Then I just think, maybe this isn’t about me.

  When I get a one-star review, I look at the one-star reviews for Mrs. Dalloway, possibly the greatest novel ever written, and I’m proud to get one-star reviews alongside it.

• paulsemel.com - https://paulsemel.com/exclusive-interview-the-bright-sword-author-lev-grossman/

  Exclusive Interview: “The Bright Sword” Author Lev Grossman
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  By Paul Semel
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  August 12, 2024
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  In his Magicians trilogy, writer Lev Grossman put his own spin on the portal fantasy genre.

  And now, with his new epic fantasy novel The Bright Sword (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), Grossman is doing the same — albeit in a very different way — to the legends of King Arthur and the Knights Of The Round Table.

  In the following email interview, Grossman discusses what inspired and influenced this story, as well as why it’s about Arty and not some other King.

  Lev Grossman The Bright Sword

  Photo Credit: ©️ Beowulf Sheehan

  To start, what is The Bright Sword about, and when and where is it set?

  The Bright Sword is a novel about King Arthur. But the story doesn’t start with The Sword In The Stone, it starts with Arthur’s death, and much of it takes place not at Camelot but in the dark, chaotic world Arthur left behind, where a little band of odd unheralded knights has to try and set things to rights, rebuild Camelot and crown a new king.

  We also tell Arthur’s story, in flashback, but with a new interpretation of who he really is and the real story of how he fell.

  So, did you set out to write a new adventure for the Knights Of The Round Table, and The Bright Sword is what you came up with, or did you come up with the idea for the plot of The Bright Sword first and then realize it would work really well, or maybe even better, if it involved King Arthur and his coworkers?

  This was only ever a King Arthur story. It’s about a succession crisis, and a love story, and a lot of coming-of-age moments, but I always knew it would only work in Arthur’s world.

  One of T.H. White’s strokes of genius was to tell the story of Arthur’s childhood [White is the author of the classic King Arthur novel The Once And Future King]. No one had ever done that before — he filled in a blank space on the map. Part of the point of The Bright Sword is to explore another blank space: the one after Arthur’s death.

  Why did you want to tell a story about King Arthur’s BFFs?

  One of the fascinating things about the Arthur story is that it means different things in different eras. I’s set in the past, but it’s always on some level about the present in which it’s being told. For T.H. White, Arthur’s story was about the problem of war and violence. For [Alfred] Tennyson [who wrote the poem cycle Idylls Of The King about King Arthur], it was about innocence and experience. I wanted to know what Arthur would be about if I told the story now.

  And then where then did you get the idea for The Bright Sword‘s plot

  The idea came from several places at once. One was [George R.R. Martin’s] A Song Of Ice And Fire: the whole plot of that series is kicked off by the death of the king (either Aerys II or Robert Baratheon, depending on how you look at it), and the succession crisis that follows. And I asked myself: what if that king were King Arthur?

  And then also I was thinking of Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead and Wide Sargasso Sea, retellings that turn things around with a different point of view.

  How then did you decide which of the Knights Of The Round Table would still be alive, and what the new Knights would be like?

  Again, it became about blank spaces on the map. I always think about, for example, the fact that T.H. White was gay, but there are no gay relationships in his Arthurian books. It was a whole part of his life and his identity that he had to erase when he wrote. Back then the world wasn’t ready for gay knights. But it’s ready now. It’s new territory to explore. The Bright Sword is about lives like that, which tradition has always erased, that need to have their stories told.

  And then, at the same time, there were just all these knights who I always wondered about. Like Palomides; he’s mostly there as the comic relief in the Tristram and Isolde story. But what’s he doing in Britain? How does it feel to be one of the few non-white, non-Christian people in Arthur’s world? And Sir Dagonet, who’s Arthur’s fool. Everyone’s always laughing at him, but he never gets a single line in Le Morte d’Arthur. It’s time we heard his voice.

  And should we read anything into how one of the knights is named Collum, which is really close to Gollum?

  Probably not. But maybe it’s an unconscious thing. I’ll ask my therapist.

  It sounds like The Bright Sword is an epic, medieval fantasy story…

  I often say that it’s an epic fantasy, but really the genre is King Arthur. One of the signatures of Arthurian stories is that they tend to happen at lots of levels at the same time. So The Bright Sword is a giant epic world-shaping war story, but it’s also a love story, and a story about a family, and all these very private personal struggles. too.

  The Bright Sword is your eighth novel. Are there any writers, or specific stories, that had a big influence on Sword but not on anything else you’ve written?

  This is an interesting question. I would definitely say that about some of the Arthurian sources: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chretien de Troyes, the old Welsh tales. I think I would say it about Hilary Mantel, too. Reading her really unlocked my voice as a historical fiction writer — the way she creates the physical realities of the past — the stone, the velvet, the metal. Somehow she knows how everything feels.

  What about non-literary influences; was The Bright Sword influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games? Because it kind of reminds me of that movie The Kid Who Would Be King.

  It was definitely influenced by The Last Of Us. That game, and the show too, made me realize I wasn’t just writing an Arthurian story, I was writing a post-apocalypse story. Like The Last Of Us, The Bright Sword is set in a disaster world, a wasteland, where the worst has happened. The center has not held. And The Last Of Us is really very Arthurian too, with its two knights errant traveling through that world; Ellie is the Grail Knight of that world.

  And how about your increasing number of cats? How, if at all, did they influence The Bright Sword?

  There’s really only two cats, a Siamese named Emma and a British shorthair named Gandalf. But the number does seem to be increasing unpredictably.

  I suppose they might have to do with the friendly lion that Collum meets. And Arthur, in his first appearance, makes a joke about an evil cat he once had. Gandalf, I hope you’re listening.

  There’s also an Old Welsh tale where Arthur actually slays a giant house cat, but I left that out, out of deference to the cats’ feelings.

  Emma, Gandalf

  One person who influenced this story — and is not a writer, a movie or TV star, or a character in a game — is your son Ross, who came out to you as trans while you were writing this story. If you don’t mind, talk a little bit about how Ross influenced the character of Sir Dinadan.

  I’d already been working on Dinadan’s story for a few years when Ross came out to me as trans. It was one of those strange convergences, and it didn’t change Dinadan’s character, but it made his story a lot more personal to me. The feelings went a lot deeper. And of course he helped me understand what Dinadan was going through. When Ross read the Dinadan chapter, he pointed out to me the moment when John Punch, a fairy, looks at Dinadan and sees that he’s really a boy. For me it was just a throwaway moment, but actually no one had ever seen Dinadan that way before, for who he really was; not his parents, not his brother, no one. John Punch is the very first one. Ross had to explain to me what a big deal it was to be seen in that way for the first time.

  And I have to ask: When your other kids heard Ross was kind of in the book, did they ask to be Knights too, or were they like, “Dad, keep us out of it. You are so weird. Leave me alone.”?

  It was that second one.

  You’re not the first person to write their own adventure for King Arthur and the Knights Of The Round Table. Last year, for instance, Thomas D. Lee wrote a really engaging one called Perilous Times. What do you think makes The Bright Sword different from other people’s King Arthur stories?

  I’m really looking forward to Perilous Times! I put off reading it till I was done with The Bright Sword. Robin Sloan’s new book Moonbound is another one.

  The big difference between those books and The Bright Sword is really just the fact that The Bright Sword keeps going after Arthur’s death. It’s not just about the tragedy, it’s not just about mourning the loss of Camelot, it’s about what it takes to survive what is in effect the end of the world — to live on after the worst has happened.

  Now, the cover of The Bright Sword says “A Novel Of King Arthur.” Does that mean that Sword is the first book in a series?

  Probably not. Though I said that about The Magicians too, and I was wrong.

  I really tried to give readers all of Arthur in this book. His origins, his life, his death, everything it meant…I’m not sure there’s any more Arthur to write about. I could keep going but I don’t know if what comes after would be Arthurian. I may have run out of Arthur.

  Now, a TV show based on The Bright Sword is currently being developed by Lionsgate. They won’t, but if the Lionsgate people ask you for casting suggestions, who would you suggest they get to play Gollum, I mean Collum, and the other main characters?

  I don’t know about casting Collum. Whoever he is, he needs to pass for 17, and I don’t know a lot of actors that young. But Emily Bader from My Lady Jane would be brilliant as Nimue. The only other character I cast in my head is [Game Of Thrones‘] Sean Bean as Bedivere. I can promise that no one will cut off his head.

  So, is there anything else someone might need to know about The Bright Sword?

  Only that you don’t need to know anything. I wrote it with both King Arthur experts and King Arthur newbies in mind. There are tons of Easter Eggs for the experts, but for those who are new to the story, I slipped in plenty of exposition.

  Lev Grossman The Bright Sword

  Finally, if someone enjoys The Bright Sword, and it’s the first book of yours they’ve read, which of your other books would you suggest they read next?

  Oh, definitely the Magicians trilogy. And the Silver Arrow books [The Silver Arrow and The Golden Swift], if you have kids. That’s it; the rest of my books are optional.

The Silver Arrow

Lev Grossman. Little, Brown, $16.99 (272p) ISBN 978-0-316-53953-1

Blending elements of conservation and magic, Grossman (The Magicians, for adults) crafts a timeless-feeling, Travers-tinged adventure in his middle grade debut. On her 11th birthday, Kate's uncle Herbert, "very rich and totally irresponsible," gives her an unexpected present: a life-size steam locomotive named the Silver Arrow. Kate and her younger brother Tom, finding the train fueled, are soon swept away by the sentient locomotive--which communicates with them via printed messages--first to acquire a selection of train cars (including delightfully stuffed candy and library compartments), and then to serve as conductors on an international rail system that transports talking animals, large and small, to new habitats. While learning to run the train and solve problems on their own, the siblings bond with myriad passengers and begin to understand global issues surrounding endangered and invasive species, habitat loss, and environmental stewardship. Though it's unclear why the magic train burns coal--a nonrenewable resource--in service of otherwise strong ecological messaging, whimsical details and well-swrought moments of adventure are neverthless certain to draw young readers. Final art not seen by PW. Ages 8--up. (Sept.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 PWxyz, LLC
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"The Silver Arrow." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 29, 20 July 2020, p. 181. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A632367721/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=314e4bc5. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.

The Silver Arrow. By Lev Grossman. Sept. 2020. 256p. Little, Brown, $16.99 (9780316539531). Gr. 4-7.

Eleven-year-old Kate longs for something more than her humdrum, normal-kid existence, and it arrives in the form of her eccentric Uncle Herbert, who has a birthday present in tow: a life-sized steam engine, the splendid Silver Arrow. When Kate and her brother notice a glow coming from the engine, they climb aboard, and the train lurches to life. Thus the bewildered siblings are sent on the mission of a lifetime, collecting ticketed animals at each stop and transporting them safely to their destinations. It's an initially cheerful premise--the children learn how to operate the magical locomotive, which communicates via cheeky printouts, and the various animals are chatty and charming. As the train puffs on, however, it becomes clear these are desperate trips for the passengers, who are relocating from endangered habitats to keep their species alive. Grossman's gorgeous middle-grade debut is vivid and amusing, and despite delightful shades of Dahl's whimsy and Pinkwater's wry directness, it's a world all its own. This gentle introduction to the complexities of life on this planet is a critical reminder not to despair over the enormity of human responsibility but to face it with joy and marvel at the magic that the world holds. It's a kind and clear message that all children--and their grownups--should take to heart.--Emily Graham

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 American Library Association
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Graham, Emily. "The Silver Arrow." Booklist, vol. 116, no. 22, 1 Aug. 2020, p. 71. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A633842033/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9ae1f139. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.

THE SILVER ARROW By Lev Grossman

It is Kate's 11th birthday, and what she wants more than anything else in the world is to feel special and necessary. To a kid in the mundane 21st century -- her parents are workaholics, and she's bored with ''kid things'' and ''real life'' -- this is a tall order, at least until her crazy Uncle Herbert shows up with an unusual birthday present loaded on a double-wide flatbed truck: the Silver Arrow, a steam train (or at least its engine and a coal car), which he drops onto tracks he's set up in the backyard, leading somewhere unknowable.

Similar to Norton Juster's phantom tollbooth, this mysterious mode of transport is the perfect vehicle for a heroine's aspirations. When Kate's parents object to train tracks where their shade garden was supposed to go, she recalls her personal hero, the computer programmer Grace Hopper, saying that ''sometimes it's better to ask forgiveness than permission.''

She and her younger brother, Tom, clamber on board and assume the role of conductors on a trip that seems easy at first -- when they reach a rail yard they're encouraged to ask for whatever they want and need: cars containing books, candy, a swimming pool, in addition to passenger, dining and sleeping cars. (Only Tom's requests for swords, guns and electronics go unheeded.) But soon they're traveling through redwood forests, over desert tundras and deep beneath the sea.

Kate has newfound responsibility. It's not just about polishing the brass fittings; as conductor, she must find fuel when it runs low, quell disputes between passengers (more on who they are later) and face her own mortality. She once wished for a zombie apocalypse or alien invasion so she could ''triumph against all the odds and save everybody.'' Now she understands adulthood's burdens.

The same delightful type of genre deconstruction that animates Grossman's young adult ''Magicians'' trilogy is at work in ''The Silver Arrow.'' ''He didn't really say blazes, but you can't put the word he did say in a book for children,'' is the narrator's cheeky aside after Kate's father swears at Uncle Herbert. The book for children in which we find this aside is an eco-fable that addresses a serious global crisis (climate change, though the term is never used) with whimsy: It's easier to get kids interested in theoretical scientific concepts if you charm them with talking animals. Which brings us to those passengers.

The travelers Kate's train collects are displaced wild creatures waiting to be relocated somewhere safe. Many are endangered or have been driven out of their habitats: a fishing cat whose mangrove swamp was drained to build a hotel, a white-bellied heron whose river was dammed to make a power plant, a half-drowned polar bear whose ice platform has all but melted. As weeks pass, these anthropomorphic refugees educate the children on widespread planetary damage done by humans. Kate feels deep shame on behalf of her species, and yet the passengers do not despise her or humanity. ''The world has lost its old balance, but it's not too late. It could still find a new one,'' the heron tells her.

Like Grossman's ''Magicians'' protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, Kate possesses both a gnawing dissatisfaction with the real world and a romantic notion of how it should be. But while in ''The Magicians'' magic provides unhappy people with a way out, in ''The Silver Arrow'' it shows Kate she need not escape into a fantasy world when there's more rewarding work to be done in this one than she'd ever imagined. The train might be extraordinary, but Kate is a normal girl with a job to do. It may not involve battling a zombie apocalypse, but it's pretty close.

Anya Jaremko-Greenwold is a freelance culture writer. THE SILVER ARROW By Lev Grossman 272 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $16.99. (Ages 8 to 12.)

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Jaremko-Greenwold, Anya. "Engine of Change." The New York Times Book Review, 29 Nov. 2020, p. 22(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A643135245/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=93f90e28. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.

Grossman, Lev THE GOLDEN SWIFT Little, Brown (Children's None) $16.99 5, 3 ISBN: 978-0-316-28354-0

Children with magical talking steam trains are thrilled by their clever new plan to rescue endangered animals.

Eleven-year-old Kate absolutely adores her secret job--helping animals in need by using the magical locomotive that was a gift from her billionaire wizard uncle. Kate loves riding the Silver Arrow with Uncle Herbert; her brother, Tom; and the talking animals they escort to safe places. But now Uncle Herbert is missing, 9-year-old Tom seems more interested in hapkido than their supernatural train, and Kate's struggling socially and academically thanks to her eco-anxiety. No matter how many animals she helps, no matter how many adults proclaim that climate change is a critical issue, the environment keeps getting worse. One night Kate discovers another train driving on the magical railroad: The Golden Swift is conducted by her classmate Jag, who thinks rescuing stranded creatures isn't sufficiently radical. When Kate joins him, she feels more inspired and more righteous than ever before. This time, she's actually making the world better! Kate's unhappy discoveries of unintended consequences and the moral complexities of her activism are softened by humor. The snarky banter of the talking locomotive is an understated delight, as is the train constructed with, among others, candy and ice cream cars, an invisible car, and a dojo car. Kate and Tom are White; Jag is described as having dark skin and black hair and possibly being Indian. Charming illustrations enhance the text.

Gentle, encouraging, witty fantasy that may soothe readers suffering from climate anxiety. (Fantasy. 8-10)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Grossman, Lev: THE GOLDEN SWIFT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A700219948/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=43a8f393. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.

The Golden Swift. By Lev Grossman. May 2022. 272p. Little, Brown, $16.99 (9780316283540). Gr. 4-7.

Kate still thrills at her responsibility as conductor of the Silver Arrow, ferrying threatened animals to safer habitats via her enchanted train. But regular-world distractions are competing for her attention: more schoolwork, a never-ending onslaught of natural disasters, and, alarmingly, a missing relative. Uncle Herbert vanished months ago, along with the timetables Kate relies on to make her magical trips. She heads out to find him but prompdy runs into more mysteries, including another train conductor with nebulous--but possibly nefarious--intentions. This Silver Arrow (2020) sequel retains the magic of the first installment but goes deeper, revealing more of the secretive train world while raising the moral stakes. The story doesn't shy away from people's increasingly complicated place in the natural world, but Grossman doesn't let humans off the hook, insisting that Kate and company continue to do their best, make mistakes, and try again. It's both encouragement for young readers navigating this fraught, fascinating world and a vital reminder that every day is a new chance for humans to change.--Emily Graham

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 American Library Association
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Graham, Emily. "The Golden Swift." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 17, 1 May 2022, p. 44. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A711045791/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e43eaa6a. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.

GROSSMAN, Lev. The Golden Swift. 272p. Little, Brown. May 2022. Tr $16.99. ISBN 9780316283540.

Gr 3-6--In this follow-up to Grossman's The Silver Arrow, Kate, who is white, waits impatiently for her uncle to deliver her train schedule, allowing her to resume her animal rescue activities. When Uncle Herbert doesn't show up, she takes the Silver Arrow out to look for him. Along the way, she runs into another train and conductor on the Great Secret Intercontinental Railway. When she discovers that the conductor of the Golden Swift has gone rogue and is implementing his own plans for the environment, Kate must choose between continuing her search for her uncle or helping the Golden Swift's conductor with his plan. On top of everything else, Kate struggles with school and her relationship with her brother. Magical trains, talking animals, and environmental change all take center stage in this story full of friendship and moral dilemmas. Kate discovers that sometimes good intentions just aren't enough. Grossman's writing style and vocabulary make this tale kid-friendly and easy to read. The riveting action will keep young readers turning pages, eager to find out what happens next. Bishop's black-and-white illustrations highlight the characters, settings, and plot in a wonderful way. VERDICT A must-purchase for libraries where The Silver Arrow is popular or stories of magic and natural wonder are desired.--Heidi Grange

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Grange, Heidi. "GROSSMAN, Lev. The Golden Swift." School Library Journal, vol. 68, no. 5, May 2022, p. 74. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A702476084/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c2d280e5. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.

Grossman, Lev THE BRIGHT SWORD Viking (Fiction None) $35.00 7, 16 ISBN: 9780735224049

King Arthur is dead--what happens now?

Collum of the Out Isles has stolen armor and a horse from his local lord, hoping to be accepted as a knight of the Round Table. But when he arrives at Camelot, the place is nearly deserted; King Arthur and a majority of his knights have died in the battle at Camlann, leaving no clear heir. With the few remaining knights and the sorceress Nimue, Collum travels across the disintegrating nation and even into the fairy Otherworld, searching for a successor to the dead Arthur and marshaling forces against the rivals who seek Britain's throne for themselves--including Morgan le Fay, Arthur's enchantress half-sister, who claims that she is the rightful heir, but mostly acts as a chaos agent throughout, helping or harming the questers as seems best to her in the moment. As the book progresses, we learn the secret backstory of each of the surviving knights as well as the nature of the relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere, the apparent spark for the civil conflict (the truth, intriguingly, is not what you think). The story of King Arthur has been told and substantially altered many times over the centuries, and explored by a multitude of contemporary novelists, but the author of the Magicians trilogy makes room for himself here. The purposeful inclusion of anachronisms recalls T.H. White's The Once and Future King, and the conflict between Christianity and pagan traditions is strongly reminiscent of Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. However, very few writers have explored post-Arthurian Britain or focused quite so much on developing the stories of the minor characters in the saga--the transgender man Sir Dinadan; Arthur's bodyguard, Sir Bedivere, secretly in love with his liege; Sir Dagonet the Fool, suffering from severe bipolar disorder; Sir Palomides, a highly educated prince of Baghdad whose not-so-secret passion for the lady Isolde keeps him in a primitive land that looks down on him for the color of his skin; and so on. This is not a realistic conjecture of how Britain would continue after the death of a charismatic leader who tried to institute new policies of standard law and justice. It's a metafiction in which the survivors of a myth attempt to extend that myth as they contend with the inner demons of their pasts.

Astoundingly, a fresh take on an extremely well-trodden legend.

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"Grossman, Lev: THE BRIGHT SWORD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A788096784/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a8aecd59. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.

Bestseller Grossman (the Magicians trilogy) turns his hand to Arthurian legends, delivering a breathtaking tale that honors past iterations while producing something entirely unexpected. Young Collum escapes the lordly household where he's been raised, liberating a suit of armor and a steed in the process, and travels to Camelot, where he hopes to serve King Arthur. He arrives too late--Arthur has already fallen at the Battle of Camlann. The few knights left at Camelot know that others will come seeking the throne but aren't sure what to do. Grossman interweaves stories of each knight's past with the ongoing quest to find a worthy heir to Arthur's crown, which takes them and Collum into the Otherworld in search of a holy lance. In his historical note, Grossman acknowledges that he is among the camp of Arthurian writers "who pick and choose what they like," producing a work "full of a lot of authentic historical detail but also a lot of anachronisms and contradictions." Indeed, Grossman has his own take on beloved characters: Sir Bedivere is in unrequited love with Arthur, witty Sir Dinadan is trans and learned swordcraft from a fairy, and Sir Palomides is secretly a prince of Baghdad. There's even a hint that Collum may be something more than he first appears. Grossman does a remarkable job of pulling together these disparate strands while providing enough combat and magic to keep the pages turning. Epic fantasy fans will hang on every word. (July)

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"The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur: Lev Grossman. Viking, $35 (688p) ISBN 978-0-7352-2404-9." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 19, 13 May 2024, p. 79. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799108763/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ea6388c9. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.

THE BRIGHT SWORD: A Novel of King Arthur, by Lev Grossman

King Arthur is dead. What now?

With this question, Lev Grossman's new novel, ''The Bright Sword,'' joins 1,400 years of storytelling and resoundingly earns its place among the best of Arthurian tales.

The aspiring hero of this epic is Collum, an adventurer who is equal parts naïve and sardonic. He survived a brutally abusive childhood by promising himself someday he'd be a knight under King Arthur, and so, now a young man, he steals a suit of armor, crafts a new life story and sets out to join the Round Table.

But when he arrives, he finds Camelot in shambles. The hero he admired was killed in a battle just weeks earlier. Ambitious would-be kings and powerful fairies are amassing on the borders. All that remain to uphold Arthur's legacy are a handful of downtrodden knights and Nimue, Merlin's apprentice and usurper. (Grossman's version acknowledges that the Merlin of tradition is a sexual predator, and Nimue, a bold young woman trying to reconcile her Christian faith with her elemental magic, makes a far more interesting mage.)

Thanks to Collum's boost of enthusiasm for the lost ideals of Camelot, the knights ask for a ''great marvel,'' which opens a magical portal and sets them on quest after quest in pursuit of ... well, they're not exactly sure. Collum and the knights of the Round Table don't know what to hope for: A new king? To get the old one back? A new Camelot or the same Camelot or just a Camelot they can survive in?

The book is long, more than 600 pages, and it feels long. The story meanders, but other than a few back story chapters that are, if not unnecessary, perhaps mistimed, nothing feels superfluous. This is a narrative that demands and rewards patience.

Story lines veer from mundane to absurdly fantastical in the blink of an eye. Supernatural contests against devils and the Green Knight contrast with desperate, messy knife fights with humans. Climactic battles happen far before the end of the book, leaving the reader wondering what could be left. (Turns out, quite a bit.) But it's exactly this weirdness and rejection of expected structure that proves Grossman knows what he's doing.

Traditional Arthurian legends balance two opposing imperatives: reveling in magical paganism and reassuring us that God is the ultimate and only power in the world. Grossman successfully leans into this fundamental contradiction. One of the best scenes in the novel is an epic battle between the devious Morgan le Fay's magical forces and literal angels from on high. Collum is initially joyous at the divine intervention and then becomes utterly bereft as he realizes that none of it matters. All these otherworldly powers are incapable of caring about human life and ultimately two sides of the same coin.

The main story line of the novel belongs to Grossman's newcomer, Collum, as he becomes a knight and joins the search for a king. But he is far more than another inserted character playing in the world of Camelot. His journey is poignant and essential as he moves from trying to become part of a story to realizing that stories are lies we tell to make sense of a reality that defies simple narrative.

The other characters -- a compelling collection of knights, jesters, queens, kings and mages -- are equally strong. Standouts include Sir Dagonet, a heartbreakingly wrought jester-knight who can't seem to find any joy in the world, and Sir Dinadan. Dinadan is one of the best knights to come out of modern Arthurian tales, with a story proving sometimes the best marvels are the ones we make ourselves. He gets the novel's last line, a startlingly perfect sentiment that had me teary. The one exception to the expertly updated characters is the aforementioned Morgan le Fay. Grossman never quite knows what to do with her power and anger. But that's a minor quibble, given the complexity, depth and sheer volume of the cast of characters.

Grossman, who is best known for his The Magicians series, is at the top of his game with ''The Bright Sword,'' which is full of enviable ideas and execution. Few authors could accomplish what he has, grounding such an ambitious novel in so much tradition and history while still making it accessible and deeply affecting.

This Camelot is far more diverse and thoughtful than past iterations. It's also way more depressed. None of the characters are who or where they hoped to be in their terrifying, Arthur-less world. With their leader gone, so, too, are their dreams of transformation. The valiant, weary adventurers in this tale never know quite what to hope for, but that might be the point. They just keep hoping anyway. We didn't need to know what happened after Arthur died, but Arthuriana is far richer for the fact that Grossman, like countless storytellers before him, couldn't let the dream of Camelot go.

THE BRIGHT SWORD: A Novel of King Arthur | By Lev Grossman | Viking | 673 pp. | $35

Kiersten White is the author of the Camelot Rising series and several other novels And needs a real bio.

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White, Kiersten. "Knight Moves." The New York Times Book Review, 4 Aug. 2024, p. 10. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A803671666/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=80a85161. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.

The Bright Sword. By Lev Grossman. July 2024. 688p. Viking, $35 (9780735224049); e-book (9780735224056).

Collum is a common bastard from Mull who wants to be a knight of the round table more than anything. But when he arrives in Camelot, he's just a few weeks too late. King Arthur is dead, Excalibur is gone, and the last few (oft-forgotten) knights--loyal Bedivere, the "Saracen" Palomides, mysterious Dinadan, coquettish Constantine, and rough Villiars--have no idea what to do next. Arthur's death surely means the end of the age of heroes, and the question of who should be king next is near impossible to solve. But they'll have to figure it out somehow, because a reckoning is fast-coming on the horizon, Morgan Le Fey is looming, and Britain will need to find solid ground if it's to survive a new clash between old-world faerie and new-world Christians. Grossman's first adult fantasy novel since the completion of The Magicians series is packed with magic, quickly beloved characters, punishing twists, and exciting, bold action scenes. Satisfyingly epic but also fast-paced, this novel captures everything that's grand and magnificent about the age of King Arthur while picking at its edges and delving into its darker depths. All fantasy and mythology fans will want to make time for this moving, entertaining epic. --Leah von Essen

HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The convergent popularity of Grossman and Arthurian legend means this epic fantasy is sure to be a hit.

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von Essen, Leah. "The Bright Sword." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 17, 1 May 2024, p. 24. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804016007/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=71a37e51. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.

"The Silver Arrow." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 29, 20 July 2020, p. 181. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A632367721/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=314e4bc5. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025. Graham, Emily. "The Silver Arrow." Booklist, vol. 116, no. 22, 1 Aug. 2020, p. 71. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A633842033/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9ae1f139. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025. Jaremko-Greenwold, Anya. "Engine of Change." The New York Times Book Review, 29 Nov. 2020, p. 22(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A643135245/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=93f90e28. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025. "Grossman, Lev: THE GOLDEN SWIFT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A700219948/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=43a8f393. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025. Graham, Emily. "The Golden Swift." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 17, 1 May 2022, p. 44. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A711045791/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e43eaa6a. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025. Grange, Heidi. "GROSSMAN, Lev. The Golden Swift." School Library Journal, vol. 68, no. 5, May 2022, p. 74. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A702476084/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c2d280e5. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025. "Grossman, Lev: THE BRIGHT SWORD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A788096784/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a8aecd59. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025. "The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur: Lev Grossman. Viking, $35 (688p) ISBN 978-0-7352-2404-9." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 19, 13 May 2024, p. 79. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799108763/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ea6388c9. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025. White, Kiersten. "Knight Moves." The New York Times Book Review, 4 Aug. 2024, p. 10. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A803671666/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=80a85161. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025. von Essen, Leah. "The Bright Sword." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 17, 1 May 2024, p. 24. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804016007/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=71a37e51. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.

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