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Academic Exercises
| Author: | K. J. Parker |
| Publisher: |
Subterranean Press, 2014 |
| Series: | The Empire |
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| Book Type: | Collection |
| Genre: | Fantasy |
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Synopsis
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.
Table of Contents:
- A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong (2011) - novella
- A Rich, Full Week (2010) - novelette
- Amor Vincit Omnia (2010) - novelette
- On Sieges (2009) - essay
- Let Maps to Others (2012) - novella
- A Room with a View (2011) - novelette
- Cutting Edge Technology (2011) - essay
- Illuminated (2012) - novelette
- Purple & Black (2009) - novella
- Rich Men's Skins: A Social History of Armour (2010) - essay
- The Sun and I (2013) - novelette
- One Little Room an Everywhere (2012) - short story
- Blue & Gold (2010) - novella
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