Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Arabian Nights) Volume 11

Every night for a thousand and one nights, a woman tells her husband a story - and each tale ends at dawn with a cliffhanger so tantalizing he cannot bring himself to execute her. This is the legendary frame of the Arabian Nights, a vast ocean of stories collected across centuries from the roads between Baghdad, Cairo, and beyond. In this volume, readers encounter the famous tales that have haunted Western imagination for generations: Ali Baba's cry of 'Open Sesame,' Sinbad's oceanic catastrophes, the dancing slave whose music contains a murder. But beyond these set pieces lies something stranger and more dangerous - a world where genies grant wishes that destroy, where kings disguise themselves as animals, where every story contains another story waiting to be born. Richard Francis Burton's translation preserves the raw exoticism and sensuality that made the collection scandalous from its first appearance in Victorian England. This is not a gentle fairy tale collection. It is a labyrinth of desire, cunning, and dark enchantment, where storytelling itself becomes the most powerful magic.