Arabian Nights

Annotation

This delightful selection of tales from The Thousand and One Nights are masterpieces of the art of storytelling. The beautiful Scheherazade saved her life by entertaining the brutal King Shahryar with these tales of magical transformations, genies and wishes, terror and passion. Here are the famous adventures of ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ and ‘Aladdin and the Magic Lamp’, as well as less familiar stories, such as ‘Prince Behram and the Princess Al-Datma, a delightful early version of The Taming of the Shrew. The tales have their origins in the cultures of India, Persia and Arabia and this edition, based on Richard F. Burton’s unexpurgated translation, gives the reader all the sensuality and lushness of the original Arabic. Exotic, bawdy and humorous, these stories-within-stories continue to captivate readers as they have done for centuries.