Academic Exercises
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Academic Exercises is the first collection of shorter work by master novelist K.J Parker, and it is a stunner. Weighing in at over 500 pages, this generous volume gathers together thirteen highly distinctive stories, essays, and novellas, including the recent World Fantasy Award-winner, “Let Maps to Others”. The result is a significant publishing event, a book that belongs on the shelf of every serious reader of imaginative fiction.
The collection opens with the World Fantasy Award-winning “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong,” a story of music and murder set against a complex mentor/pupil relationship, and closes with the superb novella “Blue and Gold,” which features what may be the most beguiling opening lines in recent memory. In between, Parker has assembled a treasure house of narrative pleasures. In “A Rich, Full Week,” an itinerant “wizard” undergoes a transformative encounter with a member of the “restless dead.” “Purple and Black,” the longest story in the book, is an epistolary tale about a man who inherits the most hazardous position imaginable: Emperor. “Amor Vincit Omnia” recounts a confrontation with a mass murderer who may have mastered an impossible form of magic.
Rounding out the volume—and enriching it enormously—are three fascinating and illuminating essays that bear direct relevance to Parker’s unique brand of fiction: “On Sieges,” “Cutting Edge Technology,” and “Rich Men’s Skins.”
Taken singly, each of these thirteen pieces is a lovingly crafted gem. Together, they constitute a major and enduring achievement. Rich, varied, and constantly absorbing, Academic Exercises is, without a doubt, the fantasy collection of the year.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Parker (the Engineer trilogy) collects 10 stories and three essays to deliver all the cynicism, dry wit, and gray morality that fans have come to expect. The World Fantasy Award winning "A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong" explores the tense relationship between a disillusioned music teacher and his brilliant but murderous student. Amoral scoundrels wreak havoc in "The Sun and I" and "Blue and Gold." In "A Rich, Full Week" and "A Room With a View," freelance wizards take jobs that seem simple, but turn out to be anything but. Impossible magic lies at the heart of "Amor Vincit Omnia" and "One Little Room an Everywhere," while "Let Maps to Others" follows a misguided expedition to a lost city. "Illuminated" offers a magical battle of the sexes, and two friends trapped in horrible jobs trade letters as they try to survive in "Purple and Black." Three essays ("On Sieges," "Cutting Edge Technology," and "Rich Men's Skins") interspersed through the collection explore different aspects of ancient military technology. This meaty compilation will please fans as well as readers who are now discovering this skilled author.