Arabian Nights; Volume 9 of 16

The Arabian Nights #9 of 16

by Anonymous, Richard Francis Burton (Translator)

Notorious for the delight he took in tweaking the sexual taboos of the Victorian age-as well as the delight he took in the resulting shock of his bashful peers-British adventurer, linguist, and author CAPTAIN SIR RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON (1821-1890) is perhaps best remembered for his unexpurgated translation of the Eastern classic The One Thousand and One Nights, more famously known today as The Arabian Nights. Originating in Persian, Indian, and Arabic sources as far back as the ninth century AD, this collection of bawdy tales-which Burton was the first to bring to English readers in uncensored form-has exerted incalculable influence on modern literature. It represents one of the earliest examples of a framing story, as young Shahrazad, under threat of execution by the King, postpones her death by regaling him with these wildly entertaining stories over the course of 1,001 nights. The stories themselves feature early instances of sexual humor, satire and parody, murder mystery, horror, and even science fiction. Burton's annotated 16-volume collection, as infamous as it is important, was first published between 1885 and 1888, and remains an entertainingly naughty read. Volume IX - "The Man of Upper Egypt and His Frankish Wife" - "The Ruined Man of Baghdad and His Slave-Girl" - "The Fakir and His Jar of Butter" - "The Unjust King and the Pilgrim Prince" - "The Serpent-Charmer and His Wife" - "Kamar Al-Zaman and the Jeweller's Wife" - "Abdullah Bin Fazil and His Brothers" - and many others.

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Classics, Fairy Tales

372 pages, Hardcover

First published July 23, 2015

About the author

Books can be attributed to "Anonymous" for several reasons:

* They are officially published under that name
* They are traditional stories not attributed to a specific author
* They are religious texts not generally attributed to a specific author

Books whose authorship is merely uncertain should be attributed to Unknown.

See also: Anonymous

Reviews

[James F · Rating 2 out of 5]

Almost to the end of the Nights, these stories were written later than the others and show a falling off of interest; many are near duplicates, especially the last one which is almost identical to the First Lady of Baghdad's tale, but with a male rather than female protagonist. There is also an increase in the overall misogyny of the tales.

The proofreading in this book is alright except for the replacement of characters with accents by Cyrillic letters, "a" with acute accent by Cyrillic "b", "i" with accent by Cyrillic "n" and so forth, probably because they seemed to have that shape to the OCR program they used.. After a while I could guess the original spellings, and it mainly affects proper names and Arabic words in the notes, but it was very annoying in a Project Gutenberg book. (Review of the Project Gutenberg e-book, not necessarily the same edition listed on Goodreads.)

[Hazel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the best volume since volume 1. There are many tales in this book that are just as good as the famous ones from collections of the nights, and is the first volume I would recommend for a read outside of those stories (most of them contained in volume 1 along with some other good tales not found in collections)

It suffers from poor book making practices like many of the others. By which I mean that it starts in the middle of a story that began in the last volume. It also ends with a mere 12 nights left. They could readily have been fitted into this volume, as it is not the thickest of the volumes.