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| Kirkus Special Editions |
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| Online Exclusive
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 | The Arabian Nights: A New Edition
March 01, 2010 - The most famous tales in The Arabian Nights have flown far beyond the confines of the night-shrouded bedroom in which Scheherazade spins stories to the vengeful king who will kill her come morning (unless she makes sure he just has to know what happens next). "There is no such thing as a canonical text of the Nights with a fixed number of stories," writes Middle East scholar Robert Irwin in his introduction to Volume 2 of Penguin Classics' new three-volume edition. So should we care that Cambridge University scholars Malcolm and Ursula Lyons, for the first time since Sir Richard Burton in the 1880s, have based this English translation on the 1839-42 Arabic edition that contains more stories than any other, usually in fuller versions? We should
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