What It's Like to Write a King Arthur Tale

The Book Review

The New York Times

Books, Arts

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 19 July 2024

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Lev Grossman, author of "The Magicians" and its two sequels, joins host Gilbert Cruz to talk about writing his version of Camelot in "The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur."

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review and this is the Book Review
0:11.7	podcast. The Sword in the Stone, Merle. Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast.
0:13.0	The Sword in the Stone, Merlin, the Lady in the Lake,
0:16.0	the Knights of the Round Table.
0:19.0	These are just a few of the stories that make up the tales of King Arthur and Camelots, which over hundreds of years
0:24.8	have been told and re-told in books and movies and plays and musicals.
0:30.0	The latest version of this story is called The Bright Sword, and its author is Lev Grossman.
0:35.0	Lev is the author of several novels, most notably the trilogy of fantasy books that begin
0:40.0	with The Magicians. Lev Grossman, welcome to the book review podcast.
0:46.0	It is good to be here.
0:48.0	Is it good to be here?
0:49.0	Is it great to be here?
0:50.0	It's great.
0:51.0	I understated it.
0:52.0	It is absolutely fantastic to be here.
0:54.0	There are so many versions of the Arthurian legend, but tell us about your version.
1:02.0	Right, well my version is called The Bright Sword and I think the major difference probably between this and other Arthurian stories is that it begins after Arthur's death.
1:13.0	A couple weeks have gone by, and Arthur has died,
1:15.6	and most really nights of the round table have died,
1:19.3	and we are in the post- Arthurian world,
1:22.4	which is a sort of darkened broken version of the chivalric
1:26.3	world that that everybody knows and the reason I decided to set part of the story there was I love the love the idea of looking at the post-apocalyps.
	...

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