The Arabian Nights (AmazonClassics Edition)

By: Andrew Lang

Narrated by: Neil Shah

Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins

Publisher's summary

The vengeful King Schahriar agrees to stave off the execution of Queen Scheherazade until she finishes a particularly compelling story. Her plan? Bleed one tale into another. Through fanciful histories, romances, tragedies, comedies, poems, riddles, and songs, Scheherazade prolongs her life by holding the king’s rapt attention.

With origins in Persian and Eastern Indian folklore, the stories of The Arabian Nights have been reworked, reshaped, revised, collected, and supplemented throughout the centuries by various authors and scholars - and are continually redefined by the modern translations of the Western world.

AmazonClassics brings you timeless works from the masters of storytelling. Ideal for anyone who wants to read a great work for the first time or rediscover an old favorite, these new editions open the door to literature’s most unforgettable characters and beloved worlds.

Revised edition: Previously published as The Arabian Nights, this edition of The Arabian Nights (AmazonClassics Edition) includes editorial revisions.

Public Domain (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

No ending

The stories were well told and interesting, but the book stops without resolving its primary hook (Scheherezade and the sultan). The lack of an ending really sullied the entire experience.

enjoyed listing to this.. good

enjoyed listing to this.. good. the narration is great. and story translation is however not that descriptive. like Original.. but still good.

Fun stories from a different age.

The voice reading/acting was high quality and it was nice having so many different stories. It was very interesting hearing stories that had far off but familiar lands.

Great Story... However

This is, of course, a wonderful classic tale...however the reading here becomes a bit tedious.

Great Narrator

Narration is amazing. All stories are great. We liked it very much. All 5 stars.

I despise the narration

Not only is this an abridged version, but the narrator has a bizarrely precious affect that is incredibly off putting and makes the whole thing almost painful to listen to. I didn't finish it the first, second, or third time I tried. I love all of Andrew Lang's compilations and this was wildly disappointing. I would skip this and do one of the fairy anthologies that has a variety of narrators instead.

Where's the rest of it?

How are you going to censor a story so much that you cut out the literal ending plot for the whole book?! What was so bad about this story in the first place that you felt the need to abridge and remove things from it to the point where it makes no actual sense anymore? I get that it might be a bit hard for some to follow all the story layers, esp if you're not paying attention, but to remove the whole ending and the entire reasoning for the book's existence is just ridiculous to me! I waited so patiently to get to the end to find out what really happened to the sultan's wife and her sister after she told all of these clever stories to the sultan, but when I got there, there was nothing... it just ended. It's such bullshit. I'm getting so tired of today's censorship and political correctness and their need to abridge everything. Can't we just quietly read our stories in peace and decide for ourselves if it's any good or not? Why do you INSIST on doing it for us?! smh...

Great Stories; Somewhat Botched Execution, Though

How can you beat these tales!? They’re true classics.

In fact, it was wonderful finally in my life to hear the true accounts of Sinbad and Aladdin and so many others.

The narration, too, is of a high quality.

But I have two basic beefs:

1) The classification ought to be by story, not by “chapter.” Chapter? What? This made it very hard to stop and start and know where one is in the course of listening.

2) I followed the plots with study guides and learned a deep, dark secret about this edition: several stories are often cropped and actually not allowed to be completed as they actually were originally written. Disappointing. Very disappointing.

Yet, many were entirely satisfactory, making this a good overall experience at a basic level.

Impeccable performance!

The stories are astonishing, narrated impeccably. It was a great pleasure listenining to this audiobook.

great for sleep!

loved it! very good narrator, easy to understand stories, which there are a great many, very detailed stories great for falling asleep!