The Arabian Nights: Based on the Text Edited by Muhsin Mahdi

by Muhsin Mahdi (Author), Muhsin Mahdi (Author), Husain Haddawy (Author)

• Used

  Deckle Edge
  2008

  $8.10

  The stories of ?The Arabian Nights ?(and stories within stories, and stories within stories within stories) are famously told by the Princess Shahrazad, under the threat of death should the king lose interest in her tale. Collected over the centuries from India, Persia, and Arabia, and ranging from adventure fantasies, vivacious erotica, and animal fables, to pointed Sufi tales, these stories provided the daily entertainment of the medieval Islamic world at the height of its glory. No one knows exactly when a given story originated, and many circulated orally for centuries before being written down; but in the process of telling and retelling, they were modified to reflect the general life and customs of the Arab society that adapted them-a distinctive synthesis that marks the cultural and artistic history of Islam. This translation is of the complete text of the Mahdi edition, the definitive Arabic edition of a fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript, which is the oldest surviving version of the tales and considered to be the most authentic.

• Used

  Paperback
  1995

  $3.36

  Full of mischief and valor, ribaldry and romance, The Arabian Nights is a work that has enthralled readers for centuries. The text presented here is that of the 1932 Modern Library edition for which Bennett A. Cerf chose the most famous and representative of the stories from the multivolume translation of Richard F. Burton.
  The origins of The Arabian Nights are obscure. About a thousand years ago a vast number of stories in Arabic from various countries began to be brought together; only much later was the collection called The Arabian Nights or the Thousand and One Nights. All the stories are told by Shahrazad (Scheherazade), who entertains her husband, King Shahryar, whose custom it was to execute his wives after a single night. Shahrazad begins a story each night but withholds the ending until the following night, thus postponing her execution.
  The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with afford-
  able hardbound editions of impor-
  tant works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-
  fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring
  as its emblem the running torch-
  bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-
  gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world'sbest books, at the best prices.This selection includes many of the stories that are universally known though seldom read in this authentic form: Alaeddin; or, the Wonderful Lamp, Sindbad the Seaman and Sindbad the Landsman, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. These, and the tales that accompany them, make delightful reading, demonstrating, as the Modern Library noted in 1932, that Shahrazad's spell remains unbroken.