Arabian Literature

In Volume 2 of Arabian Nights we return to Sultan Shahriyar’s palace where Scheherezade is using her spellbinding storytelling abilities to save both her and her sister’s lives. As much as the Sultan wants to kill her, each night he is drawn in by her tales and spares them. Scheherezade weaves a long, winding and exciting tale about Sinbad the Sailor, a reckless young man who has inherited his father’s wealth and spends it foolishly. His debts eventually force him to leave Baghdad and find his way alone.

Full of mischief, valor, ribaldry, and romance, The Arabian Nights has enthralled readers for centuries. These are the tales that saved the life of Scheherazade, whose husband, the king, executed each of his wives after a single night of marriage. Beginning an enchanting story each evening, Scheherazade always withheld the ending: A thousand and one nights later, her life was spared forever.

Bawdy and exotic, Tales from the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night features the wily, seductive Scheherazade, who saves her own life by telling tales of magical transformation, genies and wishes, flying carpets and fantastical journeys, terror and passion to entertain and appease the brutal King Shahryar.

Here is a selection of some of the best-known and best-loved tales of The Arabian Nights, including "Sinbad", "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves", "Aladdin", "The Talking Bird", and the "Fisherman and the Genie". In this "treasure house of pleasant things" you will find golden palaces, gem studded caves, and breathtaking gardens.

The vengeful King Schahriar agrees to stave off the execution of Queen Scheherazade until she finishes a particularly compelling story. Her plan? Bleed one tale into another. Through fanciful histories, romances, tragedies, comedies, poems, riddles, and songs, Scheherazade prolongs her life by holding the king’s rapt attention. With origins in Persian and Eastern Indian folklore, the stories of The Arabian Nights have been reworked, reshaped, revised, collected, and supplemented throughout the centuries by various authors and scholars.

Though The Arabian Nights are generally known as stories for children, they were originally tales for adults full of adventure, sexuality, violence, and the supernatural. They certainly inspired the imagination of Sir Richard Burton, the 19th century explorer, linguist, and erotologist who brought all his worldly experience and superbly expressive prose style to bear on the tales of Sindbad the Seaman and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.

The stories in this collection can be traced back to Middle Eastern folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age The works were collected over many centuries by various authors, translators, and scholars across West, Central, and South Asia and North Africa. Some tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Greek, Indian, Jewish, and Turkish folklore and literature.

Days before starting a history-making excavation in a remote sector of the Valley of the Kings, Dr. Alexandria Randall’s father, a fellow Egyptologist, goes missing. Alex will stop at nothing to find her father—a gargantuan task in an ancient land where she doesn’t make the rules—even if she’s also a target. Alex must swallow her pride and ask for protection from an arrogant journalist named Dan. To find her father, Alex must play Dan’s wife—a ruse that both find insufferable.

These tales are told with a rare beauty, rhyme, and rhythm. Richard Burton's translation catches the epic beauty in his unique style. It takes time to get used to Burton's prose poetry, but once you do, the reward is as deep as Shaharazad's story. As a storyteller, it was a joy to narrate these tales and bring the music of the work to life.

The central core of the stories concerns a Persian king and his new bride. The king has a brother who is a vizier in faraway Samarcand, and he invites him to come to the palace for a visit. Just before his departure, the vizier is shocked to discover his wife's infidelity. Enraged, he kills her. Full of pain and grief, the vizier continues on to the court of his brother, the king. But, once arrived at his brother's palace, the vizier soon discovers the king's wife is also involved in an even more flagrant infidelity.

Laura Kasinof studied Arabic in college and moved to Yemen a few years later - after a friend at a late-night party in Washington, DC, recommended the country as a good place to work as a freelance journalist. When she first moved to Sanaa in 2009, she was the only American reporter based in the country. She quickly fell in love with Yemen’s people and culture, in addition to finding herself the star of a local TV soap opera.

The teacher, Patrick Healy, traveled around the world, talked with people in different places, and collected around half a thousand myths, legends and folktales and their several alternative versions. His opinion and comments (directly or indirectly) are inevitable.

This is the first volume of his work. Patrick grouped together 33 famous Arabian children's stories and myths with his words. He retold the stories with his own opinion and approach to them. Patrick is an Australian writer who has an abiding interest in the folklore of different cultures. He has lived and worked in Hong Kong for over 25 years as a high school teacher. Patrick has traveled extensively throughout Asia and speaks both Cantonese and Mandarin fluently.

Dating from at least a millennium ago, these are the earliest known Arabic short stories, surviving in a single, ragged manuscript in a library in Istanbul. Some found their way into The Arabian Nights, but most have never been read in English before. Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange has monsters, lost princes, jewels beyond price, a princess turned into a gazelle, sword-wielding statues and shocking reversals of fortune.

In the mystical land of Arabia, there is secreted a magical door that opens with the command, “Open, Sesame!” Inside lays the plunder of a century of robbers and mercenaries. When Ali Baba witnesses 40 thieves open this door with the enchanted words, endless possibilities begin to unwind before him.

A terrorist mastermind will start World War III...unless a US submarine crew and a crack team of Navy SEALs can stop him first.

Gertrude Bell was leaning in 100 years before Sheryl Sandberg. One of the great woman adventurers of the 20th century, she turned her back on Victorian society to study at Oxford and travel the world and became the chief architect of British policy in the Middle East after World War I. Mountaineer, archaeologist, Arabist, writer, poet, linguist, and spy, she dedicated her life to championing the Arab cause and was instrumental in drawing the borders that define today's Middle East.

When the fae king of Naenden returns home to his palace only to find that his human queen has committed treason by conspiring to assassinate him, he has the queen executed and decrees that once every mooncycle, he’ll marry a human woman from the kingdom, only to execute her the following morning. Unless one woman offers herself as a sacrificial bride for the rest.

Indelbed is a lonely kid living in a crumbling mansion in the super-dense, super-chaotic third-world capital of Bangladesh. His father, Dr. Kaikobad, is the black sheep of their clan. A drunken loutish widower, he refuses to allow Indelbed go to school, and the only thing Indelbed knows about his mother is the official cause of her early demise: "Death by Indelbed". But when Dr. Kaikobad falls into a supernatural coma, Indelbed and his older cousin, the wise-cracking slacker Rais, learn that Indelbed's dad was in fact a magician - and a trusted emissary to the djinn world.

This delightfully narrated classic is a story within a story. In an attempt to postpone execution, the king's new bride spends one thousand and one nights enchanting him with story after story of true love, tragedy, sorcerers, and jinns.

In an attempt to win the heart of her king and a nightly stay of execution, the beautiful and wise Scheherazade spares her life and enchants her husband with exotic tales of jinn, magic lamps, daring heroics and true love. First dated as early as the 9th century, this collection of stories-within-a-story, also called The Thousand and One Nights, is colorfully narrated and will charm listeners with the classic tales of Aladdin, Ali Baba, Sinbad and more.