The Arabian Nights

Description

Few works of literature are as familiar and beloved as . Yet few remain also as unknown. In English, is a literary work of relatively recent date—the first versions of the tales appeared in English barely two hundred years ago. The tales are accompanied by a preface, a note on the text, and explanatory annotations. “Contexts” presents three of the oldest witnesses to in the Arabic tradition, together in English for the first time: an anonymous ninth-century fragment, Al Mas‘udi’s Muruj al-Dhahab, and Ibn al-Nadim’s . Also included are three related works by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust, and Taha Husayn. “Criticism” collects eleven wide-ranging essays on ’ central themes by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Josef Horovitz, Jorge Luis Borges, Francesco Gabrieli, Mia Irene Gerhardt, Tzvetan Todorov, Andras Hamori, Heinz Grotzfield, Jerome W. Clinton, Abdelfattah Kilito, and David Pinault. A Chronology of and a Selected Bibliography are also included. This Norton Critical Edition includes twenty-eight tales from translated by Husain Haddawy on the basis of the oldest existing Arabic manuscript. A fine new translation. Bawdy, colloquial and wondrously inventive. Easily the clearest, most fluent and readable translation. The resourceful Shahrazad has never been more entertaining than in this fresh and vigorous version of this immortal book. A distinguished new translation. Indispensable. Not a new version of an old favorite, but a work we’ve never known.

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