Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange

A series of tales (eighteen of them, to be precise) that aren't part of the Thousand and One Nights, but which are from the same medieval Arabian tradition and which could be slotted in there quite comfortably. So you've got your allotment of caliphs, viziers, marids, jinn and 'ifrits, to say nothin......more

This book is so lovely that I might have bought it no matter what it was about. But then -- it's the first English translation of what is the earliest known collection of Arabic stories, at least a thousand years old, some of which made their way into The Arabian Nights, but many never read in Engli......more

(This is an abridged review from my blog.) "Tales" is a collection of Arabic stories discovered by Europeans in 1933 in a manuscript created somewhere between the 14th and 15th centuries based on an original collection which probably came from some time in the mid 10th century with the whole thing tr......more

An excellent collection of medieval Arabic tales. Unfortunately there are gaps in the stories so some details are lost, but for the most part they are not significant. The translation is very readable and the poetry is moving.......more

Fantastic. Imaginative, refreshingly raw, oddly structured and frequently surprising. This one left me with imagery and story twists not to be found elsewhere. A book to be savored and reread for fun.......more