Books with author Husain Haddawy

Now as sumptuously packaged as they are critically acclaimed―a new deluxe trade paperback edition of the beloved stories. The stories of The Arabian Nights (and stories within stories, and stories within stories within stories) are famously told by the Princess Shahrazad, under the threat of death should the king lose interest in her tale. Collected over the centuries from India, Persia, and Arabia, and ranging from adventure fantasies, vivacious erotica, and animal fables, to pointed Sufi tales, these stories provided the daily entertainment of the medieval Islamic world at the height of its glory. No one knows exactly when a given story originated, and many circulated orally for centuries before being written down; but in the process of telling and retelling, they were modified to reflect the general life and customs of the Arab society that adapted them―a distinctive synthesis that marks the cultural and artistic history of Islam. This translation is of the complete text of the Mahdi edition, the definitive Arabic edition of a fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript, which is the oldest surviving version of the tales and considered to be the most authentic.

"Haddawy's translation is easily the clearest, most fluent and most readable I have met....What is delightful and memorable about these tales is the immediacy of their created worlds.... [Haddawy's translation] has style, it has elegance, it has precision." ―A. S. Byatt, London Sunday Times From the critically acclaimed translator of The Arabian Nights comes a volume of the four most popular later stories: "Sindbad the Sailor," "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," "Ala al-Din (Aladdin) and the Magic Lamp," and "Qamar al-Zaman." Readers will discover in each a world of high flamboyance and startling beauty, humor, and magic, and lessons of loyalty and love's endurance.

Now as sumptuously packaged as they are critically acclaimed―new deluxe trade paperback editions of the beloved stories. Husain Haddawy’s rapturously received translation of The Arabian Nights is based on a landmark reconstruction of the earliest extant manuscript version. Readers of this classic will also want to own Sindbad, a collection of four later stories associated with the Arabian Nights tradition, including “Sindbad the Sailor” and “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp.”

Now as sumptuously packaged as they are critically acclaimed—new deluxe trade paperback editions of the beloved stories.Husain Haddawy’s rapturously received translation of The Arabian Nights is based on a landmark reconstruction of the earliest extant manuscript version. Readers of this classic will also want to own Sindbad, a collection of four later stories associated with the Arabian Nights tradition, including “Sindbad the Sailor” and “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp.”

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)These stories (and stories within stories, and stories within stories within stories), told by the Princess Shahrazad under the threat of death if she ceases to amuse, first reached the West around 1700. They fired in the European imagination an appetite for the mysterious and exotic which has never left it. Collected over centuries from India, Persia, and Arabia, and ranging from vivacious erotica, animal fables, and adventure fantasies to pointed Sufi tales, the stories of The Arabian Nights provided the daily entertainment of the medieval Islamic world at the height of its glory.The present new translation by Husain Haddawy is of the Mahdi edition, the definitive Arabic edition of a fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, which is the oldest surviving version of the tales and is considered to be the most authentic. This early version is without the embellishments and additions that appear in later Indian and Egyptian manuscripts, on which all previous English translations were based.