In 2014, hot on the heels of the success of his Magicians trilogy, Lev Grossman announced that he was writing a Arthurian epic. As the project took shape, world events kept intruding: Donald Trump ascended to the presidency, a novel respiratory virus launched a pandemic, and Britain exited the European Union. Admist all this, Grossman realized that the question that had driven him to write this novel in the first place — What happens after Arthur dies? — was a question about the collapse of empires. And so The Bright Sword was reborn.

In this interview, I talk to Lev about the politics of Camelot, the difficulty of seeing the themes that are present in your own work, and the difficulty of tracking changes across a 700-page tome.

Special Guest: Lev Grossman.