In One Thousand and One Nights: A Retelling, al-Shaykh distills the vast corpus of the Nights down to 19 stories, thematically linked through their observation of gender dynamics, a central theme of al-Shaykh’s novels.
The second, Stranger Magic, is a beautifully written critical study by the eminent British mythographer Marina Warner, best known for her controversial study of the cult of the Virgin Mary, Alone of All Her Sex (1976). The first is a vibrant new “retelling” by the London-based Lebanese writer Hanan al-Shaykh, a novelist known for her idiosyncratic and often controversial depictions of contemporary Arab societies and their European diaspora. Why do people still keep rereading, and retranslating, the Thousand and One Nights? Does its hold have to do with the stories’ strategic positioning between “East” and “West”? Is it the frame tale that seduces readers as Shahrazad’s stories seduce her husband into postponing her execution? Or have the Nights come to feel like the fragments of a universal narrative, scattered across several centuries and languages? Intriguing answers to these questions are suggested by two recent additions to the Nights archive.
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