Mugglemarch

Following the massive success of Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling has written a novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy:

“Rowling told me, ‘Very recently, I met a girl in a shop. She was in her early twenties, and she came up to me and said, “May I hug you?” And I said yes, and we hugged. And she said, “You were my childhood.” That’s an amazing thing to hear.’

“Some people find this disheartening. In Edinburgh, I met Alan Taylor, a journalist and the editor of the Scottish Review of Books, who despaired of Rowling’s ‘tin ear’ and said of her readers, ‘They were giving their childhood to this woman! They were starting at seven, and by the time they were sixteen they were still reading bloody Harry Potter—sixteen-year-olds, wearing wizard outfits, who should have been shagging behind the bike shed and smoking marijuana and reading Camus.'”

Author: Ian Parker
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Sep 24, 2012
Length: 37 minutes (9,343 words)
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