Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange

On the shrouded corpse hung a tablet of green topaz with the inscription: 'I am Shaddad the Great. I conquered a thousand cities; a thousand white elephants were collected for me; I lived for a thousand years and my kingdom covered both east and west, but when death came to me nothing of all that I had gathered was of any avail. You who see me take heed: for Time is not to be trusted.' Dating from at least a millennium ago, these are the earliest known Arabic short stories, surviving in a single, ragged manuscript in a library in Istanbul. Some found their way into The Arabian Nights but most have never been read in English before. Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange has monsters, lost princes, jewels beyond price, a princess turned into a gazelle, sword-wielding statues and shocking reversals of fortune.

Product details

• Authors: Anonymous, Anonymous Anonymous, Robert Irwin, Malcolm Lyons, Malcolm C. Lyons
• Assisted by: Robert Irwin (Introduction), Malcolm Lyons (Translation), Malcolm C. Lyons (Translation)
• Publisher: Penguin Books Uk
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 06.10.2016
• EAN: 9780241299951
• ISBN: 978-0-241-29995-1
• No. of pages: 496
• Dimensions: 129 mm x 198 mm x 21 mm
• Series: Little Black Classics; Penguin Classics; Little Black Classics
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Fairytales, sagas, legends; FICTION / Short Stories (single author), FICTION / Classics, Short Stories