What do you think?
Rate this book
Whatever Gets You through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments
An irreverent and deeply funny retelling of the Arabian Nights
"I fear each passing night that I will not receive my maintenance dose of suspense, and then I will cease to exist."― Whatever Gets You through the Night
Whatever Gets You through the Night is an irreverent and deeply funny retelling of the Arabian Nights and a wildly inspired exploration of the timeless art of storytelling. Award-winning writer Andrei Codrescu reimagines how Sheherezade saved Baghdad's virgins and her own life through a heroic feat of storytelling―one that kept the Persian king Sharyar hanging in agonizing narrative and erotic suspense for 1001 nights. For Sheherezade, the end of either suspense or curiosity means death, but Codrescu keeps both alive in this entertaining tale of how she learned to hold a king in thrall, setting with her endless invention an unsurpassable example for all storytellers across the ages. Liberated and mischievous, Codrescu's Sheherezade is as charming as she is shrewd―and so is the story Codrescu tells.
"I fear each passing night that I will not receive my maintenance dose of suspense, and then I will cease to exist."― Whatever Gets You through the Night
Whatever Gets You through the Night is an irreverent and deeply funny retelling of the Arabian Nights and a wildly inspired exploration of the timeless art of storytelling. Award-winning writer Andrei Codrescu reimagines how Sheherezade saved Baghdad's virgins and her own life through a heroic feat of storytelling―one that kept the Persian king Sharyar hanging in agonizing narrative and erotic suspense for 1001 nights. For Sheherezade, the end of either suspense or curiosity means death, but Codrescu keeps both alive in this entertaining tale of how she learned to hold a king in thrall, setting with her endless invention an unsurpassable example for all storytellers across the ages. Liberated and mischievous, Codrescu's Sheherezade is as charming as she is shrewd―and so is the story Codrescu tells.
- GenresMiddle East
200 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2011
4 people are currently reading
120 people want to read
About the author
Andrei Codrescu
161 books151 followersAndrei Codrescu is a poet, novelist, essayist, and NPR commentator. His many books include Whatever Gets You through the Night, The Postmodern Dada Guide, and The Poetry Lesson. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
July 4, 2012
Codrescu's meditation on Sheherezade, the teller of the 1001 tales, is occasionally brilliant and frequently maddening. The author applies his prodigious imagination to an extended retelling of the frame story of the Arabian Nights and a few of the opening tales, along the way mixing in an excellent overview of the various translations plus musings on the nature of storytelling. The copious footnotes are at times hilarious, puzzling (as in "Really? He interrupted the flow of the story to tell me that?"), sophomoric, and (thankfully) enlightening.
This is a unique and enjoyable work. I wanted to like this more, but by the time the end finally came it seemed that the best parts were long past.
****
A quibble about the layout: Many of the (essential) footnotes are lengthy and run the full page width, resulting in more than 120 characters per line. This unusually wide body layout has a negative impact on readability. A multi-columnar format with narrower columns would have been a better choice for the footnotes.
Read
July 25, 2011The Thousand and One Nights, also known as The Arabian Nights, is the world’s best-travelled collection of stories, and the most popular. It might be the most-read book in English after the Bible and Shakespeare, but it has a different kind of familiarity than those canonical works.Read more...
June 7, 2017
Part of what makes the works of Andre Codrescu frustration and worth the effort is the fact that he admires Dada co-founder and fellow Romanian Tristan Tzara, has a poets drive toward obscurity, and for Andre English is a second language. Result: a refusal to use words in the way the rest of expect to read them. Against this is the poet's determination to use words with precision, and the university's professor's need to explain. Sometimes, Codrescu seems to embody the artistic technique of defamiliarization.
This is a technique based on making the familiar, unfamiliar so that we are forced to think about the common in uncommon ways. The story of the 1001 Nights is well known, even if we only know a few of the stories. Whatever Gets You Through the Night is a visionary biography of Sheherezade- indeed she is rightfully established as prior to and central to the novel portion of Codrescu's book. Note that by visionary , I mean a biography as glimpsed through a vision rather than one from mere study of the documents. Codrescu will retell a few of the stories, essay broadly on a history of storytelling and a few lectures... ultimately the book is more of a lecture course on storytelling and its role in moving humanity out of the caves.
Being somewhat used to the odd mix of the outrageous and the highly insightful observations of Codrescu, I mostly enjoyed this book. It is too antic in content to call it a novel and too novel in its premise to call it non-fiction. The fictional storyline is pierced with a mix of history, summation and magic. Then there are the footnotes. Do not skip them. Here there is more in the way of history and lecture, but also a sprinkling of not story telling. You have not read this book until you have read the footnotes.
It is hard to say exactly for whom Codrecu is writing. This is not classic novel writing or essay writing. Codrescu correctly identifies Sheherezade as a proto-feminist hero in a world heedlessly cruel towards its women. He argues that her stories are a collection from across the ancient world, not just Arabist or Syrian in origin and that storytelling is older than the 1001 Nights known in document form. Codrescu morphs Sheherezade into the all story tellers and the mother of all story tellers and as such the persona who lifted humanity from a math based language of bureaucracy and into a world of imagination.
I tend to agree with Codrescu. However, readers used to fiction being fictional, and essays being factual will have to stretch if they are to enjoy this book. Can you accept that it is allowed to blur all these lines? For me; Whatever Gets You Through the night works, but took a lot of work.
This is a technique based on making the familiar, unfamiliar so that we are forced to think about the common in uncommon ways. The story of the 1001 Nights is well known, even if we only know a few of the stories. Whatever Gets You Through the Night is a visionary biography of Sheherezade- indeed she is rightfully established as prior to and central to the novel portion of Codrescu's book. Note that by visionary , I mean a biography as glimpsed through a vision rather than one from mere study of the documents. Codrescu will retell a few of the stories, essay broadly on a history of storytelling and a few lectures... ultimately the book is more of a lecture course on storytelling and its role in moving humanity out of the caves.
Being somewhat used to the odd mix of the outrageous and the highly insightful observations of Codrescu, I mostly enjoyed this book. It is too antic in content to call it a novel and too novel in its premise to call it non-fiction. The fictional storyline is pierced with a mix of history, summation and magic. Then there are the footnotes. Do not skip them. Here there is more in the way of history and lecture, but also a sprinkling of not story telling. You have not read this book until you have read the footnotes.
It is hard to say exactly for whom Codrecu is writing. This is not classic novel writing or essay writing. Codrescu correctly identifies Sheherezade as a proto-feminist hero in a world heedlessly cruel towards its women. He argues that her stories are a collection from across the ancient world, not just Arabist or Syrian in origin and that storytelling is older than the 1001 Nights known in document form. Codrescu morphs Sheherezade into the all story tellers and the mother of all story tellers and as such the persona who lifted humanity from a math based language of bureaucracy and into a world of imagination.
I tend to agree with Codrescu. However, readers used to fiction being fictional, and essays being factual will have to stretch if they are to enjoy this book. Can you accept that it is allowed to blur all these lines? For me; Whatever Gets You Through the night works, but took a lot of work.
November 8, 2025
I hated this book. Despite the very few flashes of brilliance, I hated the over-the-top faux scholarship; I hated the 2 sisters servicing the king at the same time; I hated the fact that one of the sisters was definitely underage, if not both; I hated the long meandering footnotes ... and yes, I am not the marvelously-read intellectual that would get all the wit, but good lord, this book was also boring ... and what great scholarship if the Arabic and Persian words on the first page are written in the wrong order and not connected as those languages are? ... Oh wait: I must have also hated myself because I read through more than half of it before realizing there is no deep understanding about human nature or anything close to it. ... wit without heart ... I hated it!
April 24, 2024
3.5 - This is a fun and clever retelling of the Arabian Nights, modernized and through a nifty meta frame. It mostly works, but the authorial audience Codrescu imbues through the book simultaneously feels too strong and too timid. The first part of the book gradually builds footnotes upon footnotes into this crescendo of multipage asides, but then they go chapters upon chapters without another intrusion. It's odd, and I'm still not sure what to make of it.
Ultimately I feel like I learned a lot of lovely backstory on Nights, and enjoyed the fresh translations for some old favorite tales. Worth the time!
Ultimately I feel like I learned a lot of lovely backstory on Nights, and enjoyed the fresh translations for some old favorite tales. Worth the time!
November 22, 2025
The footnotes would have been better as end notes. As it was, they took this reader out of the story *way* too much.
January 23, 2012
Despite the catchy cover art, this is a tedious outing to the realm of the ARABIAN NIGHTS. The author reworks the framing story by giving Sheherezade the powers of a medium to foretell the future to the extent that she can place the setting of a tale in the Turkish Sultanate, which did not yet exist during the Baghdad Caliphate, where the stories are spun. He also states that her three Fates were called Antoine Galland, Richard Burton and Husain Haddawy, all famous translators of the NIGHTS who were only to come along many centuries later. Otherwise, King Sharyar continues putting off his wife's execution in the morning so that along with his wife's sister, Dinarzad, he can hear a tale's end the next night, as in the original NIGHTS.
To some, the author's reshaping of the framing story of Sheherezade and the tales themselves may have charm, yet his copious notes overwhelm the tales to the point that I simply stopped reading them. The relationship between the three principal characters is so over the top in terms of ribaldry as to be truly grating. The tales themselves made such little sense to me finally that I allowed myself to imagine that had the Sheherezade of the original NIGHTS spun such drek to him the king certainly would have had her executed promptly at dawn (as he does in a Poe short story that imagines there was a one thousand and SECOND tale that thoroughly disgusted the potentate). To me this was a time-waster, and I should just read the original ARABIAN NIGHTS which is still my intent despite this misfire.
To some, the author's reshaping of the framing story of Sheherezade and the tales themselves may have charm, yet his copious notes overwhelm the tales to the point that I simply stopped reading them. The relationship between the three principal characters is so over the top in terms of ribaldry as to be truly grating. The tales themselves made such little sense to me finally that I allowed myself to imagine that had the Sheherezade of the original NIGHTS spun such drek to him the king certainly would have had her executed promptly at dawn (as he does in a Poe short story that imagines there was a one thousand and SECOND tale that thoroughly disgusted the potentate). To me this was a time-waster, and I should just read the original ARABIAN NIGHTS which is still my intent despite this misfire.
April 18, 2012
We know the basic tale of the inventive, clever Sheherezade: how the cruel King Shahryar wedded and bedded a different virgin every night and had her killed at dawn and how Sheherezade bargained with her life by entertaining him for 1,001 nights until he no longer wished to kill her, thus saving an entire nation of terrified women. This novel tells how this all began, how two kings were betrayed and their very different reactions following the murder of their betrayers.
It roves wittily through past, present and future (when the problem of how to re-populate a world depleted of women becomes neatly solved through the miracle of cloning) and engages in storytelling of its own including, et al, a bizarre three-way conversation among men living in three different centuries and countries. It’s argumentative, probing, amusing and ribald, touching on the religious, sexual and psychological aspects of other cultures.
If I had any problem with this book (and it’s a big one!) it’s the excessive, sprawling usage of footnotes, which cover many pages, run on from one page to another and, in quite a few cases, overwhelm the text of the story proper. To ignore them is to be distracted, out of the corner of one’s eye, by mosquito-like scrawls on the page; to read them is to gain a fuller understanding of the text but be led hopelessly off the literary path and struggling to get back on it again.
It roves wittily through past, present and future (when the problem of how to re-populate a world depleted of women becomes neatly solved through the miracle of cloning) and engages in storytelling of its own including, et al, a bizarre three-way conversation among men living in three different centuries and countries. It’s argumentative, probing, amusing and ribald, touching on the religious, sexual and psychological aspects of other cultures.
If I had any problem with this book (and it’s a big one!) it’s the excessive, sprawling usage of footnotes, which cover many pages, run on from one page to another and, in quite a few cases, overwhelm the text of the story proper. To ignore them is to be distracted, out of the corner of one’s eye, by mosquito-like scrawls on the page; to read them is to gain a fuller understanding of the text but be led hopelessly off the literary path and struggling to get back on it again.
Want to read
August 18, 2011Well, shoot, who could resist this, especially since Amazon is offering at 45% off. (as a companion reading, I heartily recommend Edward Rice's bio Captain Sire Richard Francis Burton, one of first Eng translators of Arabian Tales)
September 5, 2015
This was both infuriating and bloody brilliant. Wow. I can't breathe. I read this on trains and I finished it in bed. I'm having a moment of mind-blowing awe. This is the best incarnation of Scherezade yet. And the best retelling. Wow.
December 27, 2016
What happens when you take the quintessential story within a story and put another 5 layers on, under and through it, including language and translation analysis, cultural theory and time travel? You get amused, confused and hopefully excused if you can't produce a better review.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews