One Thousand and One Nights: A Retelling

Product Description

Passed down over centuries from India, Persia, and across the Arab world, the mesmerizing stories of 
One Thousand and One Nights are related by the beautiful, young Shahrazad as she attempts to delay her execution. Retold in modern English by the acclaimed Lebanese author Hanan al-Shaykh, here are stories of the real and the supernatural, love and marriage, power and punishment, wealth and poverty, and the endless trials and uncertainties of fate. Bringing together nineteen classic tales, in these pages al-Shaykh weaves an utterly intoxicating collection, rich with humor, violence, and romance.

Review

“Magical. . . . Bursting with jinnis and mischief.”
—Donna Tartt,
The Times (London)

“[al-Shaykh] brings the modern fiction writer’s gift for psychological complexity to the rich-but-streamlined quality of the originals. . . . Read through knowing you’re getting the very best of
The Arabian Nights.”
—
The Atlantic

“Spellbinding.”
—
O, The Oprah Magazine
“al-Shaykh performs a great service in retelling [the Arabian Nights]. . . . [She] has shifted the camera angles, as it were, and trained the spotlight on the characters. . . . We get more of the essence of these stories, their anarchic humor and cheerful sadism.”
—NPR

“A treat and a trap for story lovers. Like a contemporary Shahrazad, al-Shaykh has rendered 19 little masterpieces into a wondrously warm, ribald and hilarious concoction.”
—Hanif Kureishi,
The Guardian (London)

About the Author

Hanan al-Shaykh, an award-winning journalist, novelist, and playwright, is the author of the short story collection I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops; the novels The Story of Zahra, Women of Sand and Myrrh, Beirut Blues, and Only in London; and a memoir about her mother, The Locust and the Bird. She was raised in Beirut, educated in Cairo, and lives in London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface
 
I don’t recall exactly whether I was eight or ten years old when I first heard the words
Alf layla wa layla, one thousand and one nights, but I do remember listening to a radio dramatization and being utterly smitten: the clamour, hustle and bustle of the bazaars and souks, the horses’ hooves, the creaking of a dungeon door, how the radio seemed to vibrate and shake at the footsteps of a demon, and the famous crow of the lonely rooster at the start of each episode, which would be answered by all the roosters in our neighbourhood.
I heard that a girl in my class had
Alf layla wa layla, and I hurried with her to peer at a few volumes in a glass cabinet, next to a carved tusk of an elephant. The volumes were leather-bound, their title engraved in gold. I asked my friend if I might touch one, but she said that her father always locked the cabinet and kept the key in his pocket, because he said he feared that if anyone finished the stories they would drop dead. Of course I didn’t know then, and neither did my friend, that the reason her father didn’t want any of the women of the house to read
Alf layla wa layla was because of its explicit sexuality.
As the years passed, my obsession with
Alf layla wa layla faded. I wanted desperately to escape the world it evoked. But Shahrazad found her way to me. I decided I must discover why, while most Arabs considered the framing story of Shahrazad to be a mere cliché, academics regarded it as a work of genius and a cornerstone of Arabic literature.
I read page after page, marvelling at Shahrazad’s perseverance in remaining the king’s prisoner in order to reveal to him the truth of her mind. I came to see that her weapon was art at its best, her endless invention of all of those magnificent stories. The more I read, the more I came to admire the flat, simple style I had so criticised in the past. The simplicity of the language touched me, for it was the language of those who didn’t reach for a dictionary but expressed their true, crude, raw and intense feelings, whether they praised, elegised or d