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“It’s a sequel. Scheherazade has told all these stories and the king, Shahryar, who used to kill a wife every night, has said his troubled mind is finally at peace. He’s ‘magnanimously’ granted her freedom and she no longer has to keep telling stories. Arabian Nights and Days goes out into the streets outside. It’s a sort of multiverse of 1001 Nights where you have various characters from the stories who happen to be living around the place where the stories are being narrated. You have Sinbad telling the stories of his sea journeys. You have Kamar al-Zaman, who’s a very beautiful figure in one of the stories. One story that Naguib Mahfouz tells is about two djinnis who have a debate about who’s the most beautiful person in the world. There’s a boy and a girl and they can’t decide. So they bring them together to find out who’s more desperate to love the other, as a way of judging their beauty.” Read more...
The best books on Fairy Tale Tellers
Nicholas Jubber, Travel Writer
