Academic Exercises
Pages: 529
|Published: 31 Jul 2014
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 & 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 & 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.
Contents:
- A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong (2011)
- A Rich, Full Week (2010)
- Amor Vincit Omnia (2010)
- On Sieges (2009)
- Let Maps to Others (2012)
- A Room with a View (2011)
- Cutting Edge Technology (2011)
- Illuminated (2012)
- (2009)
- Rich Men’s Skins; A Social History of Armour (2013)
- The Sun and I (2013)
- One Little Room an Everywhere (2012)
- (2010)
Cover illustration by Vincent Chong
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 & 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 & 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.
Contents:
- A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong (2011)
- A Rich, Full Week (2010)
- Amor Vincit Omnia (2010)
- On Sieges (2009)
- Let Maps to Others (2012)
- A Room with a View (2011)
- Cutting Edge Technology (2011)
- Illuminated (2012)
- (2009)
- Rich Men’s Skins; A Social History of Armour (2013)
- The Sun and I (2013)
- One Little Room an Everywhere (2012)
- (2010)
Cover illustration by Vincent Chong
