Weekly Event Post--Lev Grossman and Michael Poore at Boswell Tomorrow, August 7, 7 pm.

We only have one event this week, but what an event! We are pleased to host Lev Grossman and Michael Poore together tomorrow, Tuesday, August 7, 2012.

Lev Grossman is the author of The Magicians and its sequel, The Magician King. Jim Higgins in a Journal Sentinel blog post directs folks to a good interview at the AVClub with Todd VanDerWerff. As noted, Grossman is also the book editor at Time magazine, and is the author of another novel, Codex, which also had a great bookseller rec in the Schwartz days.

There's also a video of Grossman being interviewed by Jeff VanderMeer of Omnivoracious.


If you haven't decided whether or not to read this series, let alone come to the event, here's some encouragement from Alexander Chee from last year's NPR review:

"The novel's structure is the bravura performance, with the quest in the present crosscut regularly by flashback chapters from Julia's past, the two timelines intersecting at the climax. We discover the old wound that binds Julia and Quentin to Fillory's doom — and with it, the book's true precipitating moment, as well as what is at stake for this world — moments before the novel's climax. The payoff is spectacular, a climax reinventing what we know of both novels thus far in the trilogy." Read the rest here.

Grossman is in the area for an event at Chicago's Leaky Con this coming Friday, August 10. It's a conversation with John Green. Can it be sold out yet? I suspect so.

As you know, opening for Grossman will be Michael Poore, author of Up Jumps the Devil.  Publishers Weekly offered this praise:

"In his skillfully plotted and richly metaphorical debut novel, Poore sweeps from the beginning of time to a media-obsessed, 21st-century America chronicling the Devil’s quest to 'raise the civilizations of earth until they looked down on Heaven.'"

Laura Schultz in the online magazine The New York Journal of Books calls Up Jumps the Devil an "elegiac masterpiece."

I have no video to show you of Poore, so I leave you with the next best thing, John Davis and the Monster Orchestra with some disco-era mood music.