Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘The Thousand and One Nights’

Close Readings

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The Thousand and One Nights is an ‘infinite text’: it has no fixed shape or length, no known author and is transformed with each new translation. In this first episode of Fiction and the Fantastic, Marina Warner and Anna Della Subin explore two particularly mysterious stories in the context of the wider mysteries and pleasures of the Nights. ‘The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad’ highlights the pleasures of dreaming, the power of language and the imagination’s essential role in eroticism, while ‘Abdullah of the Sea and Abdullah of the Land’ demonstrates how the fantastic can help us imagine new ways of living.

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Further reading in the LRB:

Marina Warner: Travelling Text

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n24/marina-warner/travelling-text

Steven Connor: One’s Thousand One Nightiness

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n06/steven-connor/one-s-thousand-one-nightinesses

William Gass: A Book at Bedtime

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n21/william-gass/a-book-at-bedtime

Marina Warner: ‘The Restless One’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/june/the-restless-one

NEXT EPISODE: ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift, out on Monday 10 February.

Get the book: https://lrb.me/sealenightsff

Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.

Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.

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