In this month's episode, I talk to New York Times-bestselling author Lev Grossman about his new middle-grade fantasy novel, The Silver Arrow, which follows 11-year-old Kate and her younger brother Tom on a magical ecological adventure. It's a classic children's adventure novel in the style of The Phantom Tollbooth or The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankwiler with an important modern message.
In this live online event, produced for Kepler's Literary Foundation, we discuss the difference between writing for adults and writing for children, the joy of creating voices and personalities for each of the talking animals, Lev's favorite kids' books, and the feedback his kids gave him on the book.
--
Lev Grossman is a writer and journalist best known for the New York Times-bestselling Magicians trilogy, a series of urban fantasy novels that were adapted into a television show by the same name. In addition to those novels and The Silver Arrow, he has written two other books, Warp and Codex. His essays and criticism have also been published in Vanity Fair, the Believer, the Village Voice, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Salon, Slate, Wired, Entertainment Weekly, the Week, Buzzfeed, NPR, and Lingua Franca. He served as the lead technology writer and book critic for Time magazine for nearly 15 years, from 2002 to 2016.