The Arabian Nights
The Arabian Nights gave the world Scheherazade, the woman who saved her own life by telling stories, and with her the most influential frame narrative in world literature.
Read this if you…
- want awesome Middle Eastern magical stories with genies and stuff
- want the original source for Aladdin, Sinbad, Ali Baba etc
- like stories within stories within stories within
- like the concept of a lady telling such a good story that she doesn't get murdered because the story is so good that her killer wants to hear more of the story rather than murder her
- bite sized short stories, no way to read them all, can come and go
Skip this if you…
- want 1 sustained narrative
- don't want highly sexual/adult content
- don't want to start something you will never fully finish (I have read hours and hours, and not close to ever finishing, but i have read "the highlights")
Why It Matters
The Arabian Nights gave the world Scheherazade, the woman who saved her own life by telling stories, and with her the most influential frame narrative in world literature. The tales handed Aladdin, Sinbad, and Ali Baba to global culture and made the case that storytelling itself is a survival skill. Its mark on European fiction, from Boccaccio to Borges, is huge.
The 
Take
Best super old literature I ever read. Awesome mix of fairytale, fable, religious, love, fantasy, scheming murder. Love the story within a story within a story . I read the zipes Burton compilations, 1 and 2. Fantastic. Adult material and some crazy stuff in there
Where to go next
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. The Arabian Nights shaped it. - Dumas gilded his revenge plot with your treasure-cave magic — the chapter where his hero claims his fortune is literally titled "Sinbad the Sailor" - The Count styles himself a Sinbad, gets called an Ali Baba on finding the cave, and his island retreat is praised as "something out of *The Arabian Nights*" - Through Galland's French *Mille et une nuits*, your tales gave the 19th-century novel its sense of fabulous, limitless wealth
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. The Arabian Nights shaped it. - Ackroyd calls the *Arabian Nights* arguably the most important of all literary influences on Dickens — and *David Copperfield* wears that debt on its sleeve - David names 'the Arabian Nights, and the Tales of the Genii' among the books that keep him alive in a bleak childhood (Ch. 4) - At Salem House the boys stage 'regular Arabian Nights,' with David cast as a small Scheherazade telling tales to survive the night (Ch. 7)
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. The Arabian Nights shaped it. - Childhood reading for the Brontë children, pulled off their father's parsonage shelves - Charlotte folded the *Nights* into *Jane Eyre* directly — Jane names them among her own girlhood books, and their tales of genii and enchantment color how the novel imagines escape and transformation - The wonder-tale machinery that runs quietly under a Yorkshire governess's story
- Dracula by Bram Stoker. The Arabian Nights shaped it. - Scheherazade's dawn-broken frame tale gave Stoker a model for his fragmentary diary form - He has Harker write that his captivity "seems horribly like the beginning of the Arabian Nights, for everything has to break off at cockcrow" — a knowing nod across a thousand years
Depicted in Art
Parizade rides a white horse along a cliff path, the magical singing tree balanced before her against an immense sky.
Maxfield Parrish, 1906
The sleeping prince Camaralzaman and Badoura are laid side by side on a couch as the jinn and jinnia compare their beauty.
Edmund Dulac, 1913
Scheherazade reclines in a richly patterned Persian interior, beginning her nightly tale to the unseen sultan.
Edmund Dulac, 1907
Sindbad and his companions crouch behind rocks on a rocky shore, watching the one-eyed giant slumber by a fire.
Maxfield Parrish, 1907
Scheherazade leans in to address the king on a curtained bed; her sister Dinarzad waits at the foot.
Marie-Éléonore Godefroid
Ali Baba's brother Cassim stands trapped among heaped treasure inside the thieves' luminous cavern, the door sealed behind him.
Maxfield Parrish, 1909
Aladdin, kneeling in a torchlit underground vault, watches a vast genie unfurl into the cavern's vaulted dark.
Albert Letchford, 1897
The half-petrified king sits motionless on a marble throne, draped in robes, his lower body turned to black stone.
Maxfield Parrish, 1906
Recommended Editions
Richard Francis Burton, ed. Jack Zipes
Signet Classics · 1991
Jack Zipes selects from Burton's 1885 unexpurgated version and writes a folklorist's introduction that places the cycle in its actual history. You get Burton's ornate, rhythmic, lurid Victorian English without the 16-volume commitment.
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Deep Dive
What It's About
This summary gives away plot details.
Notable Quotes
“Open, Sesame!”
“And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased to say her permitted say.”
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