The book of The Arabian Nights has become a synonym for the fabulous and the exotic. Every child is familiar with the stories of Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, and Ali Baba. Yet very few people have a clear idea of when the book was written or what exactly it is. Far from being children's stories, The Arabian Nights contains hundreds of narratives of all kinds - fables, epics, erotica, debates, fairy tales, political allegories, mystical anecdotes and comedies. It is a labyrinth of stories and of stories within stories. The Arabian Nights: A Companion guides the reader through this labyrinth, but above all uses stories as a key to the social history and the counter-culture of the medieval Near East and the world of the storyteller, the snake charmer, the burglar, the sorcerer, the drug-addict, the treasure hunter, and the adulterer.

Arabic collection.