The Arabian Nights: Their Best-known Tales

When Scheherazade marries a ruthless king known for taking a new bride each night only to have his wife killed the next morning, she comes up with a clever plan to survive. Each night, she tells the king a story. And each morning, the king postpones her execution so he can hear how it ends. Scheherazade's stories continued for one thousand and one nights. The text was first translated from Arabic into English in the early eighteenth century. In the early twentieth century, American children...