YALE'S SECRET CLUBS : LEIGH BARDUGO

IN her first book for adults. Leigh Bardugo reimagines the secret clubs at Yale :
Her books have sold more than three million copies in English, been translated into 41 languages and are being made into a series of commissioned by Netflix.

''Six of Crows'' spent more than a year on The New York Times best-seller list. Bardugo's following is passionate, nearly cultlike.

''Ninth House,'' her latest novel and her first for adults, is set not in a fake universe, but in and around Yale - although a Yale dreamt of only in Bardugo's own philosophy.

Its street, for starters, are teeming with ghosts, many bearing the gaping wounds that killed them., who cluster around the living but can be seen by only a few.

The dean of the college does secret double duty as the faculty liaison with a shadowy organization called Lethe House. In this alt-Yale, Lethe is charged with with regulating the magic practiced at eight most powerful of Yale secret societies, known here as the Ancient Eight or the Houses of the Veil.

Those elite clubs exist in real life, minus the occult nicknames, and their self-mythologizing exoticism is profoundly satisfying to their members and profoundly irritating to everyone else. 

THERE are many things that might attract a potential student to Yale, but the gloom of the dead-of-winter aesthetics in New Haven, Conn, is not the first that springs to mind. Unless, perhaps. you come from California and you hate the sunshine and you are Leigh Bardugo, future fantasy novelist.

''It was cold and gray, and it was in January,'' Bardugo said recently, describing the joy of her visit to campus, as an alienated Los Angeles teenager.

''You can't imagine what it was like for a young Goth kid, this place of stonework amid bare branches and darkness and strange wonderful buildings. I felt so at ease there.''

Bardugo, now 44 and living back in Los Angeles, had chosen as her preferred interview location Gold Bug, a Victorian-vibed jewelry-and-curio boutique named for an Edgar Allan Poe short story.

With its delicate taxidermied fawn, ostrich-egg chandelier and framed prints of lethal snakes, the shop is a little oasis of anti-Californian in a neighborhood of peppy athleisure stores. Bardugo loves it.

''Things that are dark and close to the other side are what bring me joy,'' she said.

If you read young adult fantasy fiction, you can well share that view. And you will most likely have heard of Bardugo, a superstar in the crowded genre, with books like ''Shadow and Bone'' and ''Six of Crows'' , both set in the Grishaverse, a universe where people can harness magic and science in the extraordinary ways, for good and for evil.

The honor and serving of the latest global operational research on great authors and writings, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Sarah Lyall.