Despite the title of the essay, it's mostly about The Arabian Nights, with some interesting tangents.
The Stories We Love Make Us Who We Are
Salman Rushdie
The book that we now usually call “The Arabian Nights” didn’t originate in the Arab world. Its probable origin is Indian; Indian story compendiums too have a fondness for frame stories, for Russian doll-style stories within stories, and for animal fables. Somewhere around the eighth century, these stories found their way into Persian, and according to surviving scraps of information, the collection was known as “Hazar Afsaneh,” “a thousand stories.”
How can we understand these women? There is a silence in the tale that cries out to be spoken of… Was there a conspiracy between the daughter and the father? Is it possible that Scheherazade and the vizier had hatched a secret plan?
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