The Bright Swordis out July 16 from Viking.
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By most metrics, the author Lev Grossmans life appeared to change irrevocably in 2009.
It became a best seller, and the reviews were giddy.
Grossman also announced he was feeling confident about his newest novel.
It would revisit King Arthurs England.
Eight years later, that book,The Bright Sword,is finally here.
You never know where the resistance is coming from.
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.
Hes used to a certain degree of struggle when it comes to his writing.
Keep in mind thatThe Magicianswas my first hit, and that came when I was 40, Grossman says.
I previously had two flops.
If I had then two more flops?
Ive got three kids; theyve got to eat.
I had to sort of bet on myself.
But it took a lot of sidestepping before I finally did.
One reasonThe Bright Swordtook so long was that Grossman initially kept his day job as a journalist.
Being a journalist is what I ended up doing.
But it wasnt 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 didnt want to buy them.
He answers my questions cautiously, anxious about saying anything self-pitying or self-aggrandizing.
He moved to New York, as aspiring novelists tend to do, in 1996.
He got $6,000 for it, and it received lackluster reviews.
In need of money, Grossman started applying to media jobs.
I went in for my interview, and I was like,Im going to work atThe New Yorker!
Its all going to be okay!And I didnt get the job.
He did fall into media eventually, though.
I ended up working for a magazine company but not in a writing capacity.
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 just didnt 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.
It made me want to get healthier, and so I went to therapy.
That was also the year that I started writingMagicians.Everything turned on that year.
He realized that better mental health made the writing stronger.
In our family, everybody has done some kind of writing or creative work.
Theres an association of poor mental health with creativity.
It turned out to be wrong.
He also read a great book.
In 2014, Grossman started kicking around the idea of a reimagining of King Arthur.
After I finished theMagiciansbooks, I was casting about for something new to write about, he says.
Hed lovedThe Once and Future Kingsince he read it in junior high.
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.
But theres 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.
While writing, Grossman put up giant maps of post-Roman England that then promptly fell down.
But he finished the book and its already in development for a TV series.
Now back in Brooklyn for the book tour, hes feeling a bit nostalgic.
He got on the troubled G train for the first time in ages.
The tears were starting to come.
A few stops later, he arrived at Clinton-Washington, which is actually where his place is.
I dont know what I was getting so upset about.
Ive lost it if Im getting choked up at Myrtle-Willoughby.
I was struggling with the voice of it.
Theres very little stuff about parents and children, and Arthur is all about fathers and sons.
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