Lev Grossman biography

Lev Grossman was born in 1969, the son of two English professors, and grew up in a suburb of Boston. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in literature and went on to the Ph.D. program in comparative literature at Yale, although he left after three years without finishing a dissertation.

After Yale Grossman worked for a string a dot-coms while writing freelance articles about books, technology and culture in general for numerous magazines, newspapers and websites, until he was hired by Time in 2002 and became the magazine’s book critic as well as one of its lead technology writers.

He is also the author of the international bestseller Codex.

“Once I'd figured out that I wasn't going to be an academic, I set about gradually turning myself into a journalist. I worked for a string of dot-coms while writing free-lance articles about books, technology and culture in general for various magazines, newspapers and websites, including Lingua Franca, the Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, Salon and the New York Times. In 2002 I was hired by Time and became the magazine's book critic as well as one of its lead technology writers. The New York Times says I'm “among this country's smartest and most reliable critics.”

Lev Grossman books

• Warp (1997)
• Codex (2004)
• The Magicians (2009)

Lev Grossman interviews

In June 2009 Fantasy Book Review reviewed Lev Grossman shortly after the UK publication of The Magicians.

"Like a lot of readers, I went through three well-defined phases with Narnia. Childlike Wonder, when I was around 8. Oedipal Rage, when I was in my 20’s, and thought Aslan was a heartless irresponsible god who is always off playing peek-a-boo with Lucy when he should be saving his worshippers. And now — in my late 30s, after huge tranches of therapy — I’ve arrived at something in between. I realize my differences with Lewis and Narnia are never going away. But they don’t eclipse my love of the books, and my ongoing amazement at how great they are. I think Quentin’s still stuck in phase 2."

Read the full interview here.

In June 2010 blogcritics.com published Through the Lands of Fantasy: A Conversation with Lev Grossman, Author of The Magicians.

“It was a sort of thought experiment – what would have happened to me if I’d gotten what I wanted at the age of 17, which was to go to Narnia? How would it have played out?” Grossman began writing The Magicians in 2005 and now feels that he was still working through some of the fantasies left over from adolescence. “At 35, I hadn’t worked it out. I hadn’t yet gotten over my bitterness that I hadn’t been plucked out of my boring, humdrum world and chosen to be a king.”

Read the full interview here.

Latest news: Lev Grossman

Fantasy Book Review: Book of the Month
Every month a book comes along that is just that little bit special, a book that stands head and shoulders above the others that have been read and reviewed. This book becomes our Book of the Month and below can be seen the winners since the award began in June 2009. September 2010 – Once Walked wi [...]

Joe Abercrombie reviews Lev Grossman's The Magicians
Lev Grossman's The Magicians was Fantasy Book Review's Book of the Month for May 2009. We loved it and last week fantasy author Joe Abercrombie (The First Law Trilogy, Best Served Cold) gave his thoughts on the Time critic's novel: "It's a beautiful looking hardcover on which serious design effor [...]

Lev Grossman interview – June 2009
Lev Grossman, the son of two English professors, grew up in a suburb of Boston. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in literature and went on to the Ph.D. program in comparative literature at Yale. He worked for a string of dot-coms while writing freelance articles about books, technology and c [...]

Fantasy Book Review: The Magicians by Lev Grossman
In a secret world of forbidden knowledge, power comes at a terrible price… Intelligent, awkward Quentin Coldwater’s life is changed forever when he turns up for his entrance interview to Princeton and finds his interviewer dead. Then he makes a second discovery: in the interviewer’s house is a s [...]