Love this collection. I think I’ve read it three times. Parker at his best, with stories of magic, academics, and alchemy in his characteristic pseudo-Byzantine medieval setting. ( )

Quite a collection of scoundrels & scholars, often in the same man.

Can't get enough Parker lately. After this I'm very keen to get to some of his novels--I hope they're as funny, bleak, and human as his short stories. ( )

I'm 2/3 of the way through and I'm done. Good craft, but the stories wander and don't resolve, which could be OK, but it doesn't pay off this time.

Now let's talk about the treatment of women. So far, we have two female characters, both exploited and murdered.

One is an unnamed prostitute who is charmed, raped, and has her life force stolen. There is a touching afterword where she dies a year later. Want to make this story better? Choose one of the novices from the Studium as a source. Show some life-long pain for the person who did this because they raped an innocent boy. But it is a woman, so not a big deal.

Next is a young noblewoman, named, whose skin is used to make parchment for spells.

I had a novel by K. J. Parker on my to-read list, but it isn't on my list now.
( )

I’m not sure if I want to call K. J. Parker (pseudonym of Tom Holt) a new favourite author.

On the one hand, I loved many of these stories and novellas. For instance, I did not know I needed a novella in my life in which a scholar of history has his conjectures proven right by a rival privately, forges a manuscript that proves him right publicly, finds that someone uses that forgery to decode directions to a lost continent, gets roped into sailing off on a voyage of discovery, and wanders around a dead civilization. But it turns out I did need that rollercoaster in my life, and now I’m thankful that Parker wrote it. Moreover, I liked Parker’s heroes in general: middling scholars, fond of illuminating manuscripts, whose preferred path to victory is a blend of academic research, underhanded shortcuts and reluctant realpolitik. I really like that combination of interests! The plotting of the stories, too, is uniformly tight, with endings that are pitch-perfect, despite the unexpected swerves that may have occurred on the way there.

There are a number of drawbacks, though. Most obviously, Parker’s main characters read like they might almost be the same person: they are all scholarly types who love to read, they publish highly specialist papers in journals, they illuminate manuscripts as a hobby, they force confessions by showing prospective victims their torture implements rather than using them, and they share the opinion that people who want to be in power should never be allowed to be in power (which leaves them to do the job, against their will). Parker also recycles his jokes too often for comfort.

That said, I still enjoyed these stories immensely, probably more than I’m comfortable admitting -- apparently they scratched a few itches simultaneously, several of which I did not know I had. So yeah: maybe Parker is my new guilty pleasure? ( )

A great collection of superbly-written fantasy stories interleaved with fascinating treatises on various aspects of warfare throughout history ( )