The Arabian Nights

by Chiltern Publishing

352 pages, Hardcover

Published October 1, 2024

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adored this book! I've started collecting these very cool editions from Childtern, and just loved how the book looked and all of the artwork throughout. I'd heard of the Arabian Nights but wasn't familiar with what it was about, but was delightfully surprised by how fun and charming the stories were.

The basic premise is that a king is marrying a new woman every day and then killing them on the wedding night, but one woman decides to marry him and then tell him a story every night that ends on a cliffhanger, motivating him to keep her alive to hear the next story. The stories are wildly different but most involve magic, genies, travelers, and royal escapades. One of the best is a series revolving around a merchant named Sinbad the Sailor who travels to different lands, gets imprisoned or lost, but always finds his way back richer than before. In many ways the stories feel like a proto-sitcom, because they're funny and just present bizarre scenarios.

Oddly, I actually found the story of Aladdin to be one of the weakest and most disturbing because of how Aladdin uses his (infinite) wishes to sneak into the princess palace to do creepy things, and the ending wasn't very satisfying, but still interesting to read. Disney certainly improved upon the issues of this story.

The physical copy of this book is among the most beautiful books I've ever owned, with golden page edges, thick and glossy pages, really cool drawings, and a built-in bookmark. Definitely will buy more of these editions.

Overall a great physical book to own and a classic for a reason.

[Indy · Rating 2 out of 5]

You know what they say about books and their covers . . . Apparently, this is a partial reprint of Richard Burton’s 19th Century translation/compilation. The copyright pages provide no info about translator or editor. Chiltern seems to have haphazardly cut the more sexually suggestive, violent, or otherwise interesting aspects of the original and slapped this thing together without a lot of thought for readers. The book doesn’t given the impression that anyone at Chiltern actually read it before it went out. They’ve preserved Burton’s idiosyncrasies and even an occasional typo without ensuring they gave us the best stories. For instance, they neglect to provide Aladdin or Alibaba and the 40 thieves, both of which reportedly appear in the original. My assumption is that Chiltern didn’t want to offend any corporate interests that might falsely believe they have some proprietary interest in these traditional tales. (Whether those stories were actually part of the Arabic Arabian Nights is a separate academic question. They were in Burton’s version.) Once Chiltern hacked off the risqué bits and the most popular narratives, the reader of this physically attractive volume is left with what feels like scraps of an awkward translation full of bizarre stylistic choices made by Burton, a writer who notoriously filled his “translation” with novel vocabulary, awkward turns of phrase, and narrative interpolations.

[Rachael Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't remember if I've read this before but I've certainly dipped into it. It was interesting to read the full stories we all know so well and how they've stood the test of time.

[Irina · Rating 1 out of 5]

Incredibly boring