I’m happy to report that ‘The New Press’ is still in business to this day. But not thanks to me. I was a really bad publishing intern. – Lev Grossman
I used to write in a local coffee shop, but there was another guy, another writer, who kept sitting in my favorite seat. I would show up, and he would be there, and I would get exiled to a couch or something, and it would throw me off my game. – Lev Grossman
I’ve drunk Amazon’s free Diet Coke. Nothing makes more sense to me than a company trying to make bookselling into a profitable business. I’m not anti-Amazon, and I’m not pro-publishers either. I’m pro-books. – Lev Grossman
Hating a book is not unlike hating a person; in fact it’s tempting to just go ahead and hate the author personally, by proxy, qua human being, except that I know that would be a mistake. – Lev Grossman
When I left college I thought – based on a staggeringly inadequate understanding of how the world worked – that I might like to go into book publishing. – Lev Grossman
The year after I graduated college I had a job in a library. When people underlined passages in the library books, or made notes in the margins, the books were sent to me. I erased the lines and the notes. Yes, that was my job. – Lev Grossman
I went to college at Harvard, then did three years of graduate school at Yale. At both places I studied comparative literature. People find it odd that I went to both Harvard and Yale, and I guess it is odd, but that’s just what people did where I grew up. – Lev Grossman
I’m not a Dickens guy. In grad school I had to take at least one course on the Victorians, so I took The Later Dickens, because that was what there was. – Lev Grossman
My specialty as a collector is books that almost have value. When I love a book, I don’t buy the first edition, because those have become incredibly expensive. But I might buy a beat-up copy of the second edition, third printing, which looks almost exactly the same as the first edition except that a couple of typos have been fixed. – Lev Grossman
Book tours are excellent things, and one is lucky to get to go on one, but they have a way of leeching away one’s will to live. – Lev Grossman
Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors’ houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that’s not the way the novelistic ecology works. – Lev Grossman
What surprised me about ‘The Casual Vacancy’ was not just how good it was, but the particular way in which it was good. – Lev Grossman
I got my first whiff of what big-time adult literature was all about when I was in 8th grade. I got it from Mark Linn-Baker. You know – the guy from ‘Perfect Strangers.’ – Lev Grossman
I’m not one of your knockabout, knuckle-scarred, Internet-controversy-courting book critics. Occasionally I stumble into controversy accidentally, but not because I enjoy it. It’s probably just because I’m a weird person. – Lev Grossman
I’ve only read three books by Stephen King. When I was 10 I read ‘The Long Walk,’ one of his pseudonymous Bachman books. In my early 20s, while trapped on a family vacation, I read ‘The Dark Half,’ which taught me a word I have never forgotten: psychopomp. Now I have read ’11/22/63.’ – Lev Grossman
Which is the healthier kind of literary diversity: an un-gate-kept self-published book world, run substantially through Amazon? Or our current book world, which is part-gate-kept, part-not, with many different publishers and retailers and platforms? I’m not smart enough to figure it out, but if I had to guess I’d guess the latter. – Lev Grossman
Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they’re made, they never seem quite as sacred again. – Lev Grossman
Supposedly I’ve got traces of an English accent, though I can’t hear it. I must have inherited it from my mother, who’s English, and then I think it was exacerbated by the fact that I live with an Australian. – Lev Grossman
A lot of young-adult authors, great ones, have tried their hands at literary fiction, and not a lot of them have succeeded. Not even Roald Dahl could switch-hit, and not for lack of trying. – Lev Grossman
I started thinking about the endings of novels not because I think endings are so important, but because I think they’re actually not as important as they’re sometimes given credit for. – Lev Grossman
I don’t know if I’ve ever derived such an immediate sense of calm and well-being from any book as I did from ‘Right Ho, Jeeves.’ It was like I was Pac-Man and the book was a power-up. – Lev Grossman
I have spent many, many hours reading J.K. Rowling’s work. I am a known ‘Harry Potter’ fan. – Lev Grossman
When I got to college I simply decided that I could speak French, because I just could not spend any more time in French classes. I went ahead and took courses on French literature, some of them even taught in French. – Lev Grossman
One already feels like an anachronism, writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of, but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country. – Lev Grossman
