Excerpt from The Thousand and One Nights

Published in Stories from the Thousand and One Nights: The Arabian Night's Entertainments, 1937

"The King, hearing these words, and being restless, was pleased with the idea of listening to the story; and thus, on the first night of the thousand and one, Shahrazad commenced her recitations."

The Thousand and One Nights, better known in the West as The Arabian Nights, almost needs no introduction. There is hardly a person alive who has not been enthralled by one of its tales, particularly the three most famous: "Ala-ed-Din [Aladdin] and the Wonderful Lamp," "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," and "Sinbad the Sailor." Out of the hundreds of other tales that form the book, perhaps the most well known is the "frame story"—that is, the story that provided a larger context or meaning for all the tales.

It seems that a certain...