Today The Guardian offers a review of a book that contains eighteen stories from the Arab world in the Tenth Century, which have survived in a single manuscript in a library in Istanbul. A German translation of the book appeared in 1933, but it has just appeared in English as Tales of the Marvelous and News of the Strange (London: Penguin, 2014). Six of these stories were later included in The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, but the rest are new. According to the review, they are enjoyable examples of the genre. Featuring monsters, capricious princesses, wily viziers, and concealed treasures, they are a joy to read. Here is a brief review of one of the stories, entitled “The Story of the Forty Girls and What Happened to Them with the Prince”:

A Persian prince stumbles across an enchanted castle run by a sorceress and her troop of warlike female cousins. Divested of their armor, the girls prove to be more beautiful than the houris of Paradise, and queue up to enjoy his favors. Naturally, they are all virgins. Finally the sorceress offers herself to him, forbidding the prince—who is impressively not yet exhausted—from approaching any of the others again on pain of being imprisoned, tortured and loaded with iron chains. These are conditions to which he cheerfully agrees. That adds up to forty couplings, and then some more, since the sorceress, having miraculously regained her virginity, presents herself for a second deflowering.

The review argues that the stories deserve to be treated as literature proper, but the proposed genre is “pulp fiction.” Above all, they are fun to read, or so the argument goes. I beg to differ, of course. The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night is one of my favorite books, after all. Pulp fiction it is definitely not. But I still wavered by the end of the review, which offers both an electronic mail and telephone link to order the new book. After some reflection, I decided against it. The price of some eighteen pounds sterling was neither here nor there, but I felt uneasy about the book itself. Trumpeted as an elegant block-bound edition, it struck me as somewhat over the top. I am happy to wait for the book to appear in a bit more modest edition.