The Arabian Nights
10 best books like The Arabian Nights (Anonymous): Lord of the Flies, Anna Karenina, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, The Complete Fairy Tales, The Tale of Genji, Bulfinch's Mythology, Arabian Nights and Days, Gargantua and Pantagruel, The Heptameron, Perrault's Fairy Tales
| Author | William Golding |
| ISBN | 0140283331 |
At the dawn of the next world war, a plane crashes on an uncharted island, stranding a group of schoolboys. At first, with no adult supervision, their freedom is something to celebrate; this far from civilization the boys can do anything they want. Anything. They attempt to forge their own society, failing,...
Acclaimed by many as the world's greatest novel, Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. In it Tolstoy uses his intense imaginative insight to create some of the most memorable characters in all of literature. Anna is a sophisticated woman who...
| Author | Lewis Carroll |
| ISBN | 0688120490 |
In 1865, English author CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON (1832-1898), aka Lewis Carroll, wrote a fantastical adventure story for the young daughters of a friend. The adventures of Alice-named for one of the little girls to whom the book was dedicated-who journeys down a rabbit hole and into a whimsical underworld...
| Author | Oscar Wilde |
| ISBN | 1934169579 |
The Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde includes the two definitive story collections The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891). This volume collects exquisite and poignant tales of true beauty, selfless love, generosity, loyalty, brilliant wit, and moral aestheticism,...
A princess likes stories. One of her ladies-in-waiting is good at making them up. Over years, the lady spins a long, elaborate story containing the princess's favorite theme: hot dudes nailing chicks. Crucially, the lady writes it down and here we are with history's first novel, the origin story of...
| Author | Thomas Bulfinch |
| ISBN | 0375751475 |
For almost a century and a half, Bulfinch's Mythology has been the text by which the great tales of the gods and goddesses, Greek and Roman antiquity; Scandinavian, Celtic, and Oriental fables and myths; and the age of chivalry have been known.
The stories are divided into three...
| Author | Naguib Mahfouz |
| ISBN | 0385469012 |
I decided a month or so ago to read some books by Arab authors. I was hoping to find the longing and the loneliness, the need for love and for useful work that we all share as human beings. I hoped that I would find in Arab authors kindred souls to help me bridge the sense of separation that I felt with my Muslim...
| Author | François Rabelais |
| ISBN | 0140445501 |
The dazzling and exuberant moral stories of Rabelais (c.1471-1553) expose human follies with their mischievous and often obscene humour, while intertwining the realistic with carnivalesque fantasy to make us look afresh at the world.
Gargantua depicts a young giant, reduced to laughable...
| Author | Marguerite de Navarre |
In the early 1500s five men and five women find themselves trapped by floods and compelled to take refuge in an abbey high in the Pyrenees. When told they must wait days for a bridge to be repaired, they are inspired - by recalling Boccaccio's Decameron - to pass the time in a cultured manner by each telling...
| Author | Charles Perrault |
| ISBN | 0486223116 |
Here are the original eight stories from the 1697 volume Contes de temps passé by the great Charles Perrault (1628–1703) in a translation that retains the charming and unsentimental simplicity that has won Perrault a permanent position in French literature. These were among the earliest versions...
| Author | Xun Lu |
| ISBN | 0824813170 |
This collection of short stories by Lu Xun, commonly considered one of the greatest writers in 20th-century China and often referred to as the father of modern Chinese literature, includes the celebrated short story, "A Madman's Diary". This short story is considered to be one of the first and most...
| Author | Vālmīki |
| ISBN | 0520227034 |
El Ramayana es un libro de la India antigua. Se cree que sus orígenes se remontan al siglo IV a.C. ya que forma parte de los smíriti hindúes (textos no aportados directamente por Dios, sino transmitidos por la tradición). El Ramayana es una de las obras literarias más importantes de la India, este...
| Author | Andrew Lang |
| ISBN | 0486219070 |
About 2, maybe 3? years ago, I set myself the goal of reading all the color fairy tale collections edited by Andrew Lang. I vaguely remembered reading some of them when I was in elementary school, but I don't recall too many of the stories.
I was inspired to do this by Robin McKinley, who is one of...
| Author | Alexander Afanasyev |
| ISBN | 0394730909 |
Translated by Norbert Guterman
Illustrated by Alexander Alexeieff
In this most comprehensive collection of classic Russian tales available in English we meet both universal fairy-tale figures—thieves and heroes, kings and peasants, beautiful damsels and terrifying witches,...
| Author | Inea Bushnaq |
| ISBN | 0394751795 |
While containing a broad sampling of folktales from the Arab people, there are a few problems that consistently bothered me about this book. The author, in her commentary, claims that "the true Arab is the desert nomad," an idea which folklorist Dwight Reynolds has said is culturally inaccurate and...
| Author | Thomas Malory |
| ISBN | 1401307809 |
Le Morte d'Arthur (originally spelled Le Morte Darthur, Middle French for "the death of Arthur"[1]) is a reworking of existing tales by Sir Thomas Malory about the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin, and the Knights of the Round Table. Malory interprets existing French and English...
| Author | Kate Chopin |
| ISBN | 1593080018 |
When it first appeared in 1899, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening was greeted with cries of outrage. The novel’s frank portrayal of a woman’s emotional, intellectual, and sexual awakening shocked the sensibilities of the time and destroyed the author’s reputation and career. Many years passed...
| Author | Edith Wharton |
| ISBN | 1593080905 |
One of Edith Wharton’s few works of fiction that takes place outside of an urban, upper-class setting, Ethan Frome draws upon the bleak, barren landscape of rural New England. A poor farmer, Ethan finds himself stuck in a miserable marriage to Zeenie, a sickly, tyrannical woman, until he falls in...
| Author | Du Fu |
| ISBN | 0811211002 |
Tu Fu radically altered poetry as he found it in the High T’ang period. In addition to making formal innovations in language and structure, he extended the range of acceptable subject matter to include all aspects of public and private experience, thus becoming in the words of translator David Hinton,...
The Orchard: The Bostan Of Saadi Of Shiraz, Saadi
Bustan ("Būstān") is a book of poetry by the Persian poet Saadi, completed in 1257. Saadi's first work, and its title means "the orchard". The book contains the fruits of Saadi's long experience and his judgements upon life, and is illustrated...
