In the Library
One Thousand and One Nights
Anonymous, 1885
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 10 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Richard Burton
- Chapters
- Chapters 11
- Length
- Length 136k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased to say her permitted say.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer
Chaucer builds the same frame of stories within stories, but the pilgrims are walking instead of dying.
£1.99
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes
Cervantes creates the same infinite regress of tales inside tales, where storytelling is both the subject and the survival strategy.
£1.99
About the book
Dawn is a death sentence. The king has buried a wife every morning for three years, and tonight the turn is Scheherazade's, except she has begun a story she will not finish before the light comes, and a king who must know how it ends cannot kill the only mouth that can tell him. One Thousand and One Nights is the great proof that narrative is not ornament but survival: every tale she spins, of Sinbad swallowed by whirlpools, of djinn loosed from sealed brass, of caliphs prowling Baghdad in disguise to glimpse the lives their palaces hide, is also an argument made beneath the sword that a story can purchase one more sunrise. The pleasure is bottomless, a door opening onto a door opening onto a door. What you carry away is not a book but a discovery: that to be listened to is to be spared, and that the right tale, told well, can hold a blade in the air.