Cornwall

Josh knew that it was going to be hard for me to leave the twins overseas this summer, so he asked where I wanted to go to make it easier, and I said I wanted to look for real magic in Cornwall because that was ground zero for The Magicians by Lev Grossman.

I subscribe to Grossman’s Substack, and I left him a question there: “Any chance you can pass along any must-sees that served as inspiration for when Quentin goes to Cornwall in the Magician King? In any of those places or beyond?” He didn’t write back, but months later, he wrote about Cornwall and posted the first (and only) chapter he wrote from The World in the Walls.

In it, he explains, “Also not exaggerated was the gorgeousness of Cornwall, which I’d always imagined as part Woolf novel (To the Lighthouse), part Gilbert and Sullivan operetta (Penzance), part Arthurian legend (Tintagel) and part old-timey riddle (St. Ives). This turned out to be about right. It’s now one of my favorite places in the world, which is one reason it turns up in most of my books.”

Much better than an answer to my question was getting to read the first chapter of the fictional book. A fictional book inside a work of fiction. How meta. Anyway, I loved it.