The Arabian Nights is made up of embedded tales, and characters mirroring each other.

Sultan Shahryar, in retaliation following his wife's infidelity, condemns her to death and, in order to be certain of no longer being deceived, he decides to have the woman he married the day before executed every morning. . Scheherazade, the grand vizier's daughter, offers to marry the sultan. Helped by her sister, she tells the sultan a story every night, the rest of which is postponed until the next day. The sultan cannot then bring himself to kill the young woman; he postpones the execution from day to day in order to know the rest of the story started the day before. Little by little, Scheherazade gains her husband's trust and finally, after a thousand and one nights, he gives up on having her executed.

In the 21st century, the Arabian Nights are made up of a common center, around thirty stories (the framework story or the story of Scheherazade, The Merchant and the Genie, The Fisherman and the Genie, The Ladies of Bagdad , The Three Calenders, The Three Apples, The Hunchback and the stories included therein) and a set of extremely varied stories which belong to scholarly literature as well as more “popular” literature. For example, we meet jinns, efreets and ghouls. But if we had to characterize the Arabian Nights, we would have to associate them with the hundreds of other collections of tales of the same genre which were in circulation in the Arab domain (the Arabian Nights is not an isolated book).

In this edition you will read these few tales:

Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp (no. 19)
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (no. 24)
The Enchanted Horse, or The Story of the Ebony Horse (no. 130)
Sinbad the Sailor (no. 373)