Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Arabian Nights) Volume 14 (Supplemental Nights)

The ancient art of storytelling becomes a matter of life and death in this supplemental volume of the world's most seductive collection. Shahrazad continues her legendary vigil, weaving tales to hold at bay the sultan who has married and executed a thousand wives before her. Here, within Burton's famously extravagant translation, lie further treasures from the vast hoard of Arabic, Persian, Indian, and Egyptian folk tales that have beguiled readers for centuries. These stories pulse with djinns and ambitious merchants, cunning slaves and princesses trapped in impossible predicaments. They pulse with desire, betrayal, and the dark humor of the powerless surviving the powerful through wit alone. Burton's translation, first published in the 1880s, remains as controversial as it is captivating his obsessive footnotes and deliberately archaic prose have sparked outrage and admiration in equal measure for over a century. This is for readers who want the Arabian Nights as it existed in the Victorian imagination: untamed, sensual, and unapologetically strange. Not the sanitized Disney version, but the original collection in all its messy, magical glory.