Customer Favorites Bestsellers New Releases Coming Soon Blu-ray Box Sets 4K Ultra HD. Lots of eye contact. Podcasts Who Won the Week The Churn Official Colony Podcast. The Seductive Power of Traveling. The envelope held a notebook. Like most people Quentin read the Fillory books in grade school. He had to at least look.
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There he indulges in joys of college-friendship, love, sex, and booze- and receives a rigorous education in modern sorcery. Most of us secretly believed as children that we were somehow destined for greatness.
Someday there would be a letter delivered by owl or a magical wardrobe, and it would turn out we were the long-lost ruler of a land in eternal winter! Time magazine book critic Grossman The Codex explores what it might be like if this really happened. High school senior Quentin is on his way to a college interview when he wanders off the street and ends up transported to another place At first he thinks he must be in the land of Fillory, where his favorite childhood books took place, but no, he is actually at a magical college in upstate New York.
In the course of his adventures, he finds out that studying magic is actually insanely difficult and that fighting a war for the royal succession of an alternate world is much less glamorous than it sounds. But this is not quite a "be careful what you wish for" story. Ultimately, being a magician is, in fact, awesome. They picked their way along the cold, uneven sidewalk together: James, Julia, and Quentin.
James and Julia held hands. Or at least the available evidence pointed overwhelmingly to that conclusion. James seemed to have a sixth sense for when Quentin was starting to feel sorry for himself. James was right after him. Lots of eye contact. Her dark hair was pulled back in a wavy bunch. Somehow it made it worse that she was always so nice to him.
Quentin did the magic trick again. It was a very small trick, a basic onehanded sleight with a nickel. He did it in his coat pocket where nobody could see.
He did it again, then he did it backward. It was kind of incredible how long this had been going on, Quentin thought. The nerdiest of the nerds. By now, their senior year, Quentin knew James and Julia better than he knew anybody else in the world, not excluding his parents, and they knew him.
Everybody knew what everybody else was going to say before they said it. Everybody who was going to sleep with anybody else had already done it. Quentin was thin and tall, though he habitually hunched his shoulders in a vain attempt to brace himself against whatever blow was coming from the heavens, and which would logically hit the tall people first.
His shoulder length hair was freezing in clumps. The low gray sky threatened snow. It seemed to Quentin like the world was off ering up special little tableaux of misery just for him: Why do I always eat too much?
James put his hands behind his head, the magicians 1 серия, his fingers in his wavy chestnut hair, his camel cashmere coat wide open to the November cold, and belched mightily. Cold never bothered him. Quentin felt cold all the time, like he was trapped in his own private individual winter. In olden times there was a boy Young and strong and brave-o He wore a sword and rode a horse And his name was Dave-o …. James had written this song five years ago for a middle-school talent show skit.
He still liked to sing it; by now they all knew it by heart. I should be happy, Quentin thought. I have good friends.
My GPA is a number higher than most people even realize it is possible for a GPA to be. He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come.
He followed James and Julia past bodegas, laundromats, hipster boutiques, cellphone stores limned with neon piping, past a bar where old people were already drinking at three forty-five in the afternoon, past a brown-brick Veterans of Foreign Wars hall with plastic patio furniture on the sidewalk in front of it. All of it just confirmed his belief that his real life, the life he should be living, had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.
Maybe his real life would turn up in Princeton. He did the trick with the nickel in his pocket again. He let the cold blow through it. They describe the adventures of the five Chatwin children in a magical land that they discover while on holiday in the countryside with their eccentric aunt and uncle.
But all that unhappiness takes place far in the background. In the foreground, every summer for three years, the children leave their various boarding schools and return to Cornwall, and each time they do they find their way into the secret world of Fillory, where they have adventures and explore magical lands and defend the gentle creatures who live there against the various forces that menace them. Like most people Quentin read the Fillory books in grade school. And it was true, there was a strong whiff of the English nursery about them, and he felt secretly embarrassed when he got to the parts about the Cozy Horse, an enormous, affectionate equine creature who trots around Fillory by night on velvet hooves, and whose back is so broad you can sleep on it.
Bare trees scratch at the sky. Pale green seas lap at narrow white beaches made of broken shells. In Fillory you felt the appropriate emotions when things happened. Happiness was a real, actual, achievable possibility. It came when you called. Or no, it never left you in the first place. They stood on the sidewalk in front of the house.
The neighborhood was fancier here, with wide sidewalks and overhanging trees. The house was brick, the only unattached residential structure in a neighborhood of row houses and brownstones. It was locally famous for having played a role in the bloody, costly Battle of Brooklyn. It seemed to gently reproach the cars and streetlights around it with memories of its gracious Old Dutch past.
The old man who lived there would be kindly and eccentric and drop cryptic remarks, and then when his back was turned Quentin would stumble on a mysterious cabinet or an enchanted dumbwaiter or whatever, through which he would gaze with wild surmise on the clean breast of another world. She dropped her gaze, embarrassed. She knew how he felt, and he knew she knew, and there was nothing more to say about it.
Quentin was taller, but James was broader, more solidly built, and he pulled Quentin off balance. More than anybody else Quentin had ever met, James reminded him of Martin Chatwin. But if James was a Chatwin, what did that make Quentin? The real problem with being around James was that he was always the hero. And what did that make you? Either the sidekick or the villain. Quentin rang the doorbell. A soft, tinny clatter erupted somewhere in the depths of the darkened house.
An old-fashioned, analog ring. He rehearsed a mental list of his extracurriculars, personal goals, etc. He was absolutely prepared for this interview in every possible way, except maybe his incompletely dried hair, but now that the ripened fruit of all that preparation was right in front of him he suddenly lost any desire for it.
He had it all the time. It was one of the few things he could depend on. The doorway was guarded by a depressingly ordinary suburban screen door. Orange and purple zinnias were still blooming, against all horticultural logic, in a random scatter pattern in black earth beds on either side of the doorstep.
How weird, Quentin thought, with no curiosity at all, that they would still be alive in November. He withdrew his ungloved hands into the sleeves of his coat and placed the ends of the sleeves under his arms. Even though it felt cold enough to snow, somehow it began to rain. It was still raining five minutes later. Quentin knocked on the door again, then pushed lightly.
It opened a crack, and a wave of warm air tumbled out. He and James exchanged glances. He pushed the door all the way open. The foyer was dark and silent and muffled with Oriental rugs. Still outside, James leaned on the doorbell.
A staircase went up. On the left was a stiffunused-looking dining room, on the right a cozy den with leather armchairs and a carved, mansize wooden cabinet standing by itself in a corner. An old nautical map taller than he was took up half of one wall, with an ornately barbed compass rose.
He massaged the walls in search of a light switch. All the blinds were drawn. The quality of the darkness was less like a house with the curtains drawn than it was like actual night, as if the sun had set or been eclipsed the moment he crossed the threshold.
Quentin slow-motion-walked into the den. He had to at least look. The darkness was like a prickling electric cloud around him. The cabinet was enormous, so big you could climb into it. He placed his hand on its small, dinged brass knob. It felt like the world was revolving around him, like his whole life had been leading up to this moment. It was a liquor cabinet. A big one, there was practically a whole bar in there. Quentin reached back past the ranks of softly jingling bottles and felt the dry, scratchy plywood at the back just to make sure.
Nothing magical about it. He closed the door, breathing hard, his face burning in the darkness. It was when he looked around to make absolutely sure that nobody was watching that he saw the dead body on the floor. Fifteen minutes later the foyer was full of people and activity. He kept the back of his skull pressed firmly against the cool solid wall like it was his last point of connection to a same reality. James stood next to him. The old man lay flat on his back on the floor.
His stomach was a sizable round hump, his hair a crazy gray Einstein half—noggin. Three paramedics crouched around him, two men and a woman. The woman was disarmingly, almost inappropriately pretty—she looked out of place in that grim scene, miscast. This was the other kind, the obligatory failed resuscitation. They were murmuring in low voices, packing up, ripping off adhesive patches, discarding contaminated sharps in a special container. With a practiced, muscular movement one of the men de-intubated the corpse.
He tried to breathe slowly and keep still. He stared straight ahead, refusing to focus his eyes on what was happening in the den. He knew if he looked at James he would only see his own mental state reflected back at him in an infinite corridor of panic that led nowhere.
He wondered when it would be all right for them to leave. They spoke slowly, like they were both trying out language for the very first time. One of the paramedics, the woman, stood up from where she was squatting by the body. Quentin watched her stretch, heels of her hands pressed to her lumbar region, tipping her head one way, then the other. Then she walked over in their direction, stripping off rubber gloves. Quentin cleared his clotted throat. The woman chucked the gloves neatly into the trash from across the room.
Nice quick way to go, if you have to go. He must have been a drinker. Her cheeks were flushed from crouching down over the body. But she was not unpretty.
She was pale and thin and unreasonably lovely, with a broad, ridiculously sexy mouth. He stood up, which he should have done when she first came over anyway. He was much taller than her. Even under the circumstances, he thought, this person is carrying around a lot of attitude for a paramedic.
Unlike practically everybody, she seemed more interested in him than in James. James opened the door. The cold air was a pleasant shock. That was what Quentin needed: Less of this, whatever this was. It might be important. The day had gone still around them. It was chilly on the stoop, and getting a little damp, and he was roughly ten yards away from a corpse.
She wore a shiny yellow enamel ring and some kind of fancy silver antique wristwatch. Her nose and chin were tiny and pointy. She was a pale, skinny, pretty angel of death, and she held two manila envelopes with their names on them in block Magic Marker letters. Probably transcripts, confidential recommendations.
She twirled back into the house and closed the door. They were alone on the stoop. Quentin nodded, as if he were agreeing with something James had said. Slowly they walked back up the path to the sidewalk. He still felt dazed. They walked to the end of the block without speaking, annoyed at each other and not wanting to admit it. The slate sidewalk was wet, and the sky was white with rain. He was pissed at himself for taking it and pissed at James for not taking his. They shook hands formally.
It felt strangely final. Quentin walked away slowly down First Street. A man had died in the house he just left. He was still in a dream. The day was darkening. The sun was setting already behind the gray shell of cloud that covered Brooklyn.
For the first time in an hour he thought about all the things he had left to do today: The weight of them was dragging him back down the gravity well of the ordinary world. He would have to explain to his parents what happened, and they would, in some way he could never grasp, and therefore could never properly rebut, make him feel like it was his fault.
It would all go back to normal. He thought of Julia and James meeting at the library. She would be working on her Western Civ paper for Mr. Karras, a six-week project she would complete in two sleepless days and nights.
In the most plausible of his many fantasies James died, unexpectedly and painlessly, leaving Julia behind to sink softly weeping into his arms. As he walked Quentin unwound the little red-threaded clasp that held shut the manila envelope. The envelope held a notebook. It was old-looking, its corners squashed and rubbed till they were smooth and round, its cover foxed.
The ink had gone brown with age. The Magicians was not the name of any book by Christopher Plover that Quentin knew of. And any good nerd knew that there were only five books in the Fillory series.
When he turned the page a piece of white notepaper, folded over once, flew out and slipped away on the wind. It clung to a wrought—iron area fence for a second before the wind whipped it away again. There was a community garden on the block, a triangular snippet of land too narrow and weirdly shaped to be snapped up by developers.
With its ownership a black hole of legal ambiguity, it had been taken over years ago by a collective of enterprising neighbors who had trucked out the acid sand native to Brooklyn and replaced it with rich, fertile loam from upstate. They were running riot and strangling their frailer, more exotic competitors. It was into this tangled thicket that the note flew and disappeared. This late in the year all the plants were dead or dying, even the weeds, and Quentin waded into them hip—deep, dry stems catching on his pants, his leather shoes crunching brown broken glass.
The garden was narrow, but it went surprisingly far back. There were three or four sizable trees in it, and the farther in he pushed the darker and more overgrown it got. He caught a glimpse of the note, up high, plastered against a trellis encrusted with dead vines. It could clear the back fence before he caught up with it.
Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw something flit past behind the bracken, large and pale, but when he turned his head it was gone. He shoved his way even deeper in, brushing up against who knew what toxic flora. It was odd to see that here and there among the dead plants a few vital green stalks still poked up, drawing sustenance from who knew where.
He caught a whiff of something sweet in the air. All of a sudden it was quiet. No car horns, no stereos, no sirens. His phone had stopped ringing.
It was bitter cold, and his fingers were numb. Turn back or go on? He squeezed farther in through a hedge, closing his eyes and squinching up his face against the scratchy twigs. He stumbled over something, an old stone. He felt suddenly nauseous. When he opened his eyes again he was standing on the edge of a huge, wide, perfectly level green lawn surrounded by trees.
The smell of ripe grass was overpowering. There was hot sun on his face. The sun was at the wrong angle. And where the hell were the clouds? The sky was a blinding blue. His inner ear spun sickeningly. He held his breath for a few seconds, then expelled freezing winter air from his lungs and breathed in warm summer air in its place. It was thick with floating pollen. In the middle distance beyond the wide lawn a large house stood, all honey-colored stone and gray slate, adorned with chimneys and gables and towers and roofs and sub-roofs.
In the center, over the main house, was a tall, stately clock tower that struck even Quentin as an odd addition to what otherwise looked like a private residence. The clock was in the Venetian style: Over one wing rose what looked like the green oxidized-copper dome of an observatory. Between house and lawn was a series of inviting landscaped terraces and spinneys and hedges and fountains. Quentin was pretty sure that if he stood very still for a few seconds everything would snap back to normal.
He wondered if he was undergoing some dire neurological event. He looked cautiously back over his shoulder. There was no sign of the garden behind him, just some big leafy oak trees, the advance guard of what looked like a pretty serious forest. A rill of sweat ran down his rib cage from his left armpit. Quentin dropped his bag on the turf and shrugged out of his overcoat.
A bird chirped languidly in the silence. Fifty feet away a tall skinny teenager was leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette and watching him. He wore a button-down shirt with a sharp collar and very thin, very pale pink stripes. Quentin walked over, as nonchalantly as he could.
Even without his coat on he was sweating like a bastard. He felt like an overdressed English explorer trying to impress a skeptical tropical native. But there was something he had to ask. The young man looked at Quentin very seriously.
He took another long drag on his cigarette, then he shook his head slowly, blowing out the smoke. Grossman takes a good number of the best childhood fantasy books from the last seventy-five years and distills their ability to fascinate into the fan-boy mind of his protagonist, Quentin Coldwater.
This is it, folks. The Magicians is the most dazzling, erudite and thoughtful fantasy novel to date. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
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Related Categories Audiobooks Electronics Turntables. Beautifully designed editions at everyday low prices. There he indulges in joys of college-friendship, love. NOOK Devices NOOK by Samsung Galaxy Tab 7. Penguin Publishing Group Publication date: Magicians Series1 Sold by: BROOKLYN Quentin did a magic trick. James sang, to a tune somewhere between "Good King Wenceslas" and "Bingo": In olden times there was a boy Young and strong and brave-o He wore a sword and rode a horse And his name was Dave-o …; "God!
My beautiful interview hair! We shall be quite late! He was in Fillory. He did alumni interviews for Princeton. Maybe he really was a pedophile. Maybe he was a nice guy. Maybe he was a saint.
She was studying him. He inhaled through his nose and breathed out firmly. I mean, what if they found out? Could come in useful. The first page, handwritten in ink, read: The Magicians Book Six of Fillory and Further The ink had gone brown with age. Now he looked over.
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The Magicians: Season 1 Review - IGN
Movies TV Comics Videos All SYFY WIRE News. Gift Finder Gifts for Everyone For Her For Him For Students For Readers For Writers. As he walked Quentin unwound the little red-threaded clasp that held shut the manila envelope.
A bird chirped languidly in the silence. Close Browser Update Message. Deception - "Pilot" Review. It opened a crack, and a wave of warm air tumbled out. Quentin was pretty sure that if he stood very still for a few seconds everything would snap back to normal. The Magicians offered a strong, exciting and frequently challenging debut season that never shied away from a risk or a gamble.
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The Magicians (Magicians Series #1) by Lev Grossman | NOOK Book (eBook) | Barnes & Noble®
Each episode felt different and challenging in its own way. James, Julia, and Quentin. Gran Torino Appears" Review.
The first page, handwritten in ink, read: Bringing The Magicians from Page to Screen. Maybe his real life would turn up in Princeton. Less of this, whatever this was.
Lots of eye contact. Conditions of Use Privacy Policy. Jason Ralph talks about being a pop star for a day and, mainly, his sweet dance moves. The day was darkening.
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