1001 Arabian Nightmares

1001 Arabian Nightmares PDF Author: Narendra Simone
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781481202626
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Listen! Would you be interested in reading a few pages from a diary of a terrorist? Seriously! That is if you, like many others, believe that anyone who is from the Middle East is a potential terrorist. On the contrary I found that the Middle East is a wonderful place where laughter is in abundance. You just got to explode, I mean explore by traveling through various countries of the Middle East. Not only an exhilarating life experience, you will also discover mystery, adventure and plenty of humour. No time, no problem! I have done it for you. The last few years have been difficult for the Arab nations. The world seemed to have latched on to its stereotypical image without understanding Arab's fascinating culture. Arabia is truly a fun place. It's a secret that needs to be let out: Arabs have a deep-rooted sense of humour and it exists in their daily life. Let me explain. I know there are millions of people who can't possibly believe what I'm telling them: that Arabs both have and appreciate a sense of humour. I know that the press has convinced you otherwise. And they will. That is their job and it helps them to sell newspapers. The only way to bring in a balanced perspective is to look closely at their humour. A good and clean sense of humour to enjoy and not rude or offensive to be upsetting! Come on, don't be so serious, and smile. Did you know that humour in the Arab society is not recent or out of necessity? It has been in existence for centuries as an integral part of their culture. Way back in the Middle Ages, Mullah Nasruddin was one of the great humorists of Arab history. He has thousands of tales, my favourite is: When a ruler said to Nasruddin, "Mullah, all the great rulers of the past had honorific titles with the name of God in them. There was, for instance, 'God-Gifted', and 'God-Accepted', and so on. How about some such name for me?" Nasruddin thought only for a moment and said, "God Forbid." See what I mean: subtle. I believe that the funniest humour is the one that you experience for yourself. So I packed my bags and travelled all through Arabia. I liked it so much that I stayed there for several years. Why? Because I wanted more to get past: A priest, a rabbi and a mullah walk into a bar. The barman says - "What is this, a joke?" I needed something fresh, original and personal. Did I get it? Well, I'd let you be the judge of that. Come along on an adventurous journey with me to the fascinating world of Arabia and experience a unique brand of humour that you would not find on the Internet. Not that I don't trust the God Own Official Guide to Locating Everything (Google). Through these short, humorous stories I invite you on a journey of humour, mystery and adventure to the amazing Middle East.

1001 Arabian Nightmares

1001 Arabian Nightmares PDF Author: Narendra Simone
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781481202626
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book Here

Book Description
Listen! Would you be interested in reading a few pages from a diary of a terrorist? Seriously! That is if you, like many others, believe that anyone who is from the Middle East is a potential terrorist. On the contrary I found that the Middle East is a wonderful place where laughter is in abundance. You just got to explode, I mean explore by traveling through various countries of the Middle East. Not only an exhilarating life experience, you will also discover mystery, adventure and plenty of humour. No time, no problem! I have done it for you. The last few years have been difficult for the Arab nations. The world seemed to have latched on to its stereotypical image without understanding Arab's fascinating culture. Arabia is truly a fun place. It's a secret that needs to be let out: Arabs have a deep-rooted sense of humour and it exists in their daily life. Let me explain. I know there are millions of people who can't possibly believe what I'm telling them: that Arabs both have and appreciate a sense of humour. I know that the press has convinced you otherwise. And they will. That is their job and it helps them to sell newspapers. The only way to bring in a balanced perspective is to look closely at their humour. A good and clean sense of humour to enjoy and not rude or offensive to be upsetting! Come on, don't be so serious, and smile. Did you know that humour in the Arab society is not recent or out of necessity? It has been in existence for centuries as an integral part of their culture. Way back in the Middle Ages, Mullah Nasruddin was one of the great humorists of Arab history. He has thousands of tales, my favourite is: When a ruler said to Nasruddin, "Mullah, all the great rulers of the past had honorific titles with the name of God in them. There was, for instance, 'God-Gifted', and 'God-Accepted', and so on. How about some such name for me?" Nasruddin thought only for a moment and said, "God Forbid." See what I mean: subtle. I believe that the funniest humour is the one that you experience for yourself. So I packed my bags and travelled all through Arabia. I liked it so much that I stayed there for several years. Why? Because I wanted more to get past: A priest, a rabbi and a mullah walk into a bar. The barman says - "What is this, a joke?" I needed something fresh, original and personal. Did I get it? Well, I'd let you be the judge of that. Come along on an adventurous journey with me to the fascinating world of Arabia and experience a unique brand of humour that you would not find on the Internet. Not that I don't trust the God Own Official Guide to Locating Everything (Google). Through these short, humorous stories I invite you on a journey of humour, mystery and adventure to the amazing Middle East.

The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from 1001 Nights (The Annotated Books)

The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from 1001 Nights (The Annotated Books) PDF Author: Paulo Lemos Horta
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631493647
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 986

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Book Description
“[A]n electric new translation . . . Each page is adorned with illustrations and photographs from other translations and adaptations of the tales, as well as a wonderfully detailed cascade of notes that illuminate the stories and their settings. . . . The most striking feature of the Arabic tales is their shifting registers—prose, rhymed prose, poetry—and Seale captures the movement between them beautifully.” —Yasmine Al-Sayyad, New Yorker A magnificent and richly illustrated volume—with a groundbreaking translation framed by new commentary and hundreds of images—of the most famous story collection of all time. A cornerstone of world literature and a monument to the power of storytelling, the Arabian Nights has inspired countless authors, from Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe to Naguib Mahfouz, Clarice Lispector, and Angela Carter. Now, in this lavishly designed and illustrated edition of The Annotated Arabian Nights, the acclaimed literary historian Paulo Lemos Horta and the brilliant poet and translator Yasmine Seale present a splendid new selection of tales from the Nights, featuring treasured original stories as well as later additions including “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and definitively bringing the Nights out of Victorian antiquarianism and into the twenty-first century. For centuries, readers have been haunted by the homicidal King Shahriyar, thrilled by gripping tales of Sinbad’s seafaring adventures, and held utterly, exquisitely captive by Shahrazad’s stories of passionate romances and otherworldly escapades. Yet for too long, the English-speaking world has relied on dated translations by Richard Burton, Edward Lane, and other nineteenth-century adventurers. Seale’s distinctly contemporary and lyrical translations break decisively with this masculine dynasty, finally stripping away the deliberate exoticism of Orientalist renderings while reclaiming the vitality and delight of the stories, as she works with equal skill in both Arabic and French. Included within are famous tales, from “The Story of Sinbad the Sailor” to “The Story of the Fisherman and the Jinni,” as well as lesser-known stories such as “The Story of Dalila the Crafty,” in which the cunning heroine takes readers into the everyday life of merchants and shopkeepers in a crowded metropolis, and “The Story of the Merchant and the Jinni,” an example of a ransom frame tale in which stories are exchanged to save a life. Grounded in the latest scholarship, The Annotated Arabian Nights also incorporates the Hanna Diyab stories, for centuries seen as French forgeries but now acknowledged, largely as a result of Horta’s pathbreaking research, as being firmly rooted in the Arabic narrative tradition. Horta not only takes us into the astonishing twists and turns of the stories’ evolution. He also offers comprehensive notes on just about everything readers need to know to appreciate the tales in context, and guides us through the origins of ghouls, jinn, and other supernatural elements that have always drawn in and delighted readers. Beautifully illustrated throughout with art from Europe and the Arab and Persian world, the latter often ignored in English-language editions, The Annotated Arabian Nights expands the visual dimensions of the stories, revealing how the Nights have always been—and still are—in dialogue with fine artists. With a poignant autobiographical foreword from best-selling novelist Omar El Akkad and an illuminating afterword on the Middle Eastern roots of Hanna Diyab’s tales from noted scholar Robert Irwin, Horta and Seale have created a stunning edition of the Arabian Nights that will enchant and inform both devoted and novice readers alike.

Tales from 1,001 Nights

Tales from 1,001 Nights PDF Author:
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141965878
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 696

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Book Description
Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with a different virgin, executing her next morning. To end this brutal pattern and to save her own life, the vizier's daughter, Shahrazad, begins to tell the king tales of adventure, love, riches and wonder - tales of mystical lands peopled with princes and hunchbacks, the Angel of Death and magical spirits, tales of the voyages of Sindbad, of Ali Baba's outwitting a band of forty thieves and of jinnis trapped in rings and in lamps. The sequence of stories will last 1,001 nights.

Stranger Magic

Stranger Magic PDF Author: Marina Warner
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674065077
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
Our foremost theorist of myth, fairytale, and folktale explores the magical realm of the imagination where carpets fly and genies grant prophetic wishes. Stranger Magic examines the profound impact of the Arabian Nights on the West, the progressive exoticization of magic, and the growing acceptance of myth and magic in contemporary experience.

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights PDF Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812998928
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Harper’s Bazaar • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Guardian • The Kansas City Star • National Post • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews From Salman Rushdie, one of the great writers of our time, comes a spellbinding work of fiction that blends history, mythology, and a timeless love story. A lush, richly layered novel in which our world has been plunged into an age of unreason, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is a breathtaking achievement and an enduring testament to the power of storytelling. In the near future, after a storm strikes New York City, the strangenesses begin. A down-to-earth gardener finds that his feet no longer touch the ground. A graphic novelist awakens in his bedroom to a mysterious entity that resembles his own sub–Stan Lee creation. Abandoned at the mayor’s office, a baby identifies corruption with her mere presence, marking the guilty with blemishes and boils. A seductive gold digger is soon tapped to combat forces beyond imagining. Unbeknownst to them, they are all descended from the whimsical, capricious, wanton creatures known as the jinn, who live in a world separated from ours by a veil. Centuries ago, Dunia, a princess of the jinn, fell in love with a mortal man of reason. Together they produced an astonishing number of children, unaware of their fantastical powers, who spread across generations in the human world. Once the line between worlds is breached on a grand scale, Dunia’s children and others will play a role in an epic war between light and dark spanning a thousand and one nights—or two years, eight months, and twenty-eight nights. It is a time of enormous upheaval, in which beliefs are challenged, words act like poison, silence is a disease, and a noise may contain a hidden curse. Inspired by the traditional “wonder tales” of the East, Salman Rushdie’s novel is a masterpiece about the age-old conflicts that remain in today’s world. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is satirical and bawdy, full of cunning and folly, rivalries and betrayals, kismet and karma, rapture and redemption. Praise for Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights “Rushdie is our Scheherazade. . . . This book is a fantasy, a fairytale—and a brilliant reflection of and serious meditation on the choices and agonies of our life in this world.”—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian “One of the major literary voices of our time . . . In reading this new book, one cannot escape the feeling that [Rushdie’s] years of writing and success have perhaps been preparation for this moment, for the creation of this tremendously inventive and timely novel.”—San Francisco Chronicle “A wicked bit of satire . . . [Rushdie] riffs and expands on the tales of Scheherazade, another storyteller whose spinning of yarns was a matter of life and death.”—USA Today “A swirling tale of genies and geniuses [that] translates the bloody upheavals of our last few decades into the comic-book antics of warring jinn wielding bolts of fire, mystical transmutations and rhyming battle spells.”—The Washington Post “Great fun . . . The novel shines brightest in the panache of its unfolding, the electric grace and nimble eloquence and extraordinary range and layering of his voice.”—The Boston Globe

The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights

The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights PDF Author:
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141943564
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1228

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Book Description
Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with a different virgin, executing her next morning. To end this brutal pattern and to save her own life, the vizier's daughter, Shahrazad, begins to tell the king tales of adventure, love, riches and wonder - tales of mystical lands peopled with princes and hunchbacks, the Angel of Death and magical spirits, tales of the voyages of Sindbad, of Ali Baba's outwitting a band of forty thieves and of jinnis trapped in rings and in lamps. The sequence of stories will last 1,001 nights.

The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights

The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights PDF Author: Anonymous
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101488050
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1292

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Book Description
Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with a different virgin, executing her next morning. To end this brutal pattern and to save her own life, the vizier's daughter, Shahrazad, begins to tell the king tales of adventure, love, riches and wonder - tales of mystical lands peopled with princes and hunchbacks, the Angel of Death and magical spirits, tales of the voyages of Sindbad, of Ali Baba's outwitting a band of forty thieves and of jinnis trapped in rings and in lamps. The sequence of stories will last 1,001 nights.

Arabian Nights and Days

Arabian Nights and Days PDF Author: Naguib Mahfouz
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 1101974710
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz refashions the classic tales of Scheherazade into a novel written in his own imaginative, spellbinding style. Here are genies and flying carpets, Aladdin and Sinbad, Ali Baba, and many other familiar stories from the tradition of The One Thousand and One Nights, made new by the magical pen of the acknowledged dean of Arabic letters, who plumbs their depths for timeless truths.

Seven Nights

Seven Nights PDF Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811218382
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
The incomparable Borges delivered these seven lectures in Buenos Aires in 1977; attendees were treated to Borges' erudition on the following topics: Dante's The Divine Comedy, Nightmares, Thousand and One Dreams, Buddhism, Poetry, The Kabbalah, and Blindness.

Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange

Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange PDF Author: Anonymous
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141395052
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 549

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Book Description
On the shrouded corpse hung a tablet of green topaz with the inscription: 'I am Shaddad the Great. I conquered a thousand cities; a thousand white elephants were collected for me; I lived for a thousand years and my kingdom covered both east and west, but when death came to me nothing of all that I had gathered was of any avail. You who see me take heed: for Time is not to be trusted.' Dating from at least a millennium ago, these are the earliest known Arabic short stories, surviving in a single, ragged manuscript in a library in Istanbul. Some found their way into The Arabian Nights but most have never been read in English before. Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange has monsters, lost princes, jewels beyond price, a princess turned into a gazelle, sword-wielding statues and shocking reversals of fortune.