The Arabian Nights - Softcover

Wiggin, Kate Douglas; Parrish, Maxfield

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0965231232 ISBN 13: 9780965231237

Publisher: Book-of-the-Month Club, 1996

Synopsis

This elegant edition of 10 classic tales of The Arabian Nights features a powerful introduction by Mark Helprin, offering new insight into the "thousand mercurial forms" and "inexact nature" of these Eastern tales. Helprin probes for fresh understanding of our culture's deep engagement with these fantastical imaginings which, after being passed along orally for thousands of years, evolved into what we have come to know as The Arabian Nights. Accompanied by 12 full-color Maxfield Parrish illustrations from the 1909 edition, the wondrous narrative that began in what is now the Middle East and spread outward to encompass the globe is here reborn in an edition expertly translated by Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora A. Smith. The stories here include Aladdin which tells of an aimless street urchin who is seduced by the wiles of a magician and finds himself trapped in a cave filled with sumptuous jewels, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves in which a poor man discovers the secret lair of a band of looters, and The Talking Bird, the Singing Tree, and the Golden Water the story of two princes and a princess who are stolen from their parents at birth and raised by a kindly gardener.

About this title

About the Author:

Kate Douglas Wiggin, noted child educator and author, was born in Philadelphia in 1856. In her twenties she helped organize the Pacific Coast's first free kindergarten in San Francisco; and, with her sister, Nora, established a training school for kindergarten teachers in that same city. Wiggin is the author of many popular children's books, among them The Birds' Christmas Carol (1887), Timothy's Quest (1890), and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903). She died in 1923.

About this edition

• Publisher: Book-of-the-Month Club
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0965231232
• ISBN 13: 9780965231237
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 339
• Illustrator: Helprin Mark