Lev Grossman on the Enduring Story of King Arthur

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | How to Listen

You may know Lev Grossman for his best-selling Magicians trilogy of fantasy novels, which were adapted into a TV show also called “The Magicians” and which were “like ‘The Secret History’ crossed with ‘Harry Potter’” and Narnia, in the words of Edan Lepucki, who reviewed the final book in the series for us.

Now Grossman is back with a new novel, “The Bright Sword,” in which he takes on the legend of King Arthur as a sort of dark comic postapocalypse. Grossman visits the podcast this week and tells the host Gilbert Cruz why he chose to open his book a couple of weeks after the deaths of King Arthur and most of the famous knights of the Round Table.

“The reason I decided to set part of the story there was, I love the idea of looking at the postapocalypse. What happens to the people who lived on after Arthur? How do you live on after the center has not held and the sun has gone out? And how do you put things back together? And then I also was very attracted to the idea that most of the heroes who we know and love are gone. Gawain is gone. Gareth is gone. Lionel, Galahad — almost everybody is gone. And so what you have left is a little band of knights, and it’s not the knights that you think of. It’s the people who spend most of the time on the margins of the story. … I wanted to take these guys and place them center stage, and let them tell their story.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected].