The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night is a 1923 novel by Edward Powys Mathers and J. C. Mardrus.
The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night is a novel in which a layered collection of over four hundred interwoven tales are framed by the story of Scheherazade, who tells nightly stories to King Shahrayar to delay her execution. The work unfolds as a nested narrativeâÂÂstories within storiesâÂÂranging from well-known adventures like Aladdin and Sinbad to more obscure tales. The collection still offers a vast spectrum of literary elements: fantasy, intrigue, humor, and philosophical depth. The stories span from simple fables to complex narratives.
The Thousand Nights and One Night was translated by Mardrus and Mathers and published in four volumes by Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Wendy Graham reviewed The Thousand Nights and One Night for Adventurer magazine and stated that "I kept promising myself I'd stop when I reached the end of the book I was on. I kept on reading to the end. Whatever you want from a book you can find in the Nights - from dreams and fantasies to big-bestseller intrigues, crude humour and not-so-crude, simple stories side by side with tales of Borgesian complexity and resonance. If you think you know the stories already, you are in for a big surprise. Kings and princes and towers, battles and djinni and houris, fables and histories and legends: the whole adding up to more than the sum of its parts. I unreservedly recommend it."