The Khaavren Romances are a series of fantasy novels by American writer Steven Brust, set in the fictional world of Dragaera.
[1] The series is written by Brust in the voice and persona of a Dragaeran novelist, Paarfi of Roundwood, whose style is a tongue-in-cheek parody of Dumas, matching both his swashbuckling sense of adventure and his penchant for tangents and longwindedness.
Brust claims to have changed Paarfi's original text in a number of ways in order to accommodate the differences in language.
For example, the Dragaeran language has gender neutral pronouns, which Brust has translated into the generic male, a change that outrages Paarfi during one of their conversations.
Paarfi's regular intrusions, combined with the biographical information included in several of the peripheral essays, make him into a frame tale for the series.
Most of the characters in the Khaavren Romances have no sorcerous ability or training, and use no magical weaponry apart from a limited supply of grenade-like "flashstones".
Paarfi wrote The Phoenix Guards during a time roughly contemporary to Vlad's life, while the rest of the series was written at least one hundred years later.
Roz Kaveney, reviewing Brust's bibliography in the 1999 book The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, called the Khaavren series "the jauntiest and most likeable" of his novels.