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.
