Penny (William): A student who enters Brakebills with Alice and Quentin. He proves the existence of Fillory and finds passage to it. Charles Shaughnessy as Christopher Plover (seasons 1, 4, 5), the reclusive author of the Fillory books and a childhood hero of Quentin's.

Anyone who grew up reading about magical wardrobes and unicorns and talking trees before graduating to Less Than Zero and The Secret History and Bright Lights, Big City will immediately feel right at home with this smart, beautifully written book by Lev Grossman. The Magicians is fantastic, in all senses of the word. It’s strange, fanciful, extravagant, eccentric, and truly remarkable–a great story, masterfully told.” Traditional Fantasy Novels power(as well as their stodgy childishness) lie to a degree in their pedagogical function. They are to an extent primers for young people on how to behave, how to become a more effective human being, how to be brave in the face of adversity and to learn to be selfless on occasion even though ones adolescent genes(and jeans) are screaming for pure selfish, solipsistic, I am the center of the universe, expression.Lev Grossman is an American Novelist best known for The Magicians, a fantasy novel set in modern times which aims to upend some of the tropes that surround Magic and witches in literature. Magic is hard, and growing up proves even harder. Brahmall ages this group of would-be adventurers, gradually inserting the pessimistic uncertainty that creeps in as their graduation approaches, and then the slovenly vulgarity that accompanies their post-grad malaise in New York. But their voices find fresh purpose and energy when Penny discovers that Fillory, the magical land of those books from their youth, is real. Fraught with the tensions sprouting between them, each member of Quentin's posse has reasons to escape into Fillory. Brahmall gives voice to everything from a birch tree to an ancient ram, as the group's quest for a brighter future turns ever more ugly and alarming. Quentin's once idyllic dream now corrupted, he struggles to regain a sense of self and return to the more banal hostilities of the real world. Grossman did some freelancing and wrote for other magazines. Some of the works he wrote at this time include "The Death of a Civil Servant," "Good Novels Don't Have to be Hard," "Catalog This," "The Gay Nabokov," "When Words Fail," and "Get Smart." He freelanced at The Believer, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Salon, Lingua Franca, and Time Digital. It was soon after this that his first novel, Warp, was published. [1] Metcalf, Mitch (December 17, 2015). "Updated: ShowBuzzDaily's Top 150 Wednesday Cable Originals & Network Update: 12.16.2015". Showbuzzdaily. Archived from the original on December 18, 2015 . Retrieved December 17, 2015. Spencer Daniels as Charlton (season 5; guest, seasons 3–4), a former victim of the Monster at the End of the World. Later he ends up inside Eliot's head and can only communicate with Eliot.

In an article for The New York Times Grossman wrote: "I wrote fiction for 17 years before I found out I was a fantasy novelist. Up till then I always thought I was going to write literary fiction, like Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith or Jhumpa Lahiri. But I thought wrong. ... Fantasy is sometimes dismissed as childish, or escapist, but I take what I am doing very, very seriously. [15] St. James, Emily (August 10, 2011). "Review: The Magician King". The A.V. Club. Archived from the original on November 13, 2013 . Retrieved November 13, 2013.During a summer vacation, Quentin is confronted by Julia. She reveals that she took the Brakebills entrance exam at the same time as Quentin, but failed. Failed applicants' memories of the school and of the existence of magic are wiped, but on Julia the erasure was imperfect; she has become obsessed with learning magic. Quentin tells her the school's location, hoping she will have her memory properly erased. The series ages the characters up to graduate school students and compresses the Brakebills degree to three years. Most of the events detailed in the novel, the Antarctic trip for instance, appear to happen in Quentin's first year at Brakebills with years in the novel being roughly condensed into semesters in the TV show. Jane Chatwin is involved earlier and more heavily, and Quentin is more formally diagnosed with depression. [19] Comic books [ edit ] Don’t worry about it, everybody here is. If they even brought you in for the Exam you were the smartest person in your school, teachers included.”