Lev Grossman’s book The Magicians may initially seem to be a cheap ripoff of the Harry Potter series: a young man who doesn’t quite fit in discovers he has a talent for sorcery, and is whisked out of the “real world” into a university that trains magicians. Grossman is not plagiarizing Harry Potter; he is responding to it. He is responding, as well, to Lewis’s Narnia series, and in a sense to all fantasy.