Whatever Gets You through the Night
A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
An irreverent and deeply funny retelling of the Arabian Nights
"I fear each passing night that I will not receive my maintenance dose of suspense, and then I will cease to exist."—Whatever Gets You through the Night
Whatever Gets You through the Night is an irreverent and deeply funny retelling of the Arabian Nights and a wildly inspired exploration of the timeless art of storytelling. Award-winning writer Andrei Codrescu reimagines how Sheherezade saved Baghdad's virgins and her own life through a heroic feat of storytelling—one that kept the Persian king Sharyar hanging in agonizing narrative and erotic suspense for 1001 nights. For Sheherezade, the end of either suspense or curiosity means death, but Codrescu keeps both alive in this entertaining tale of how she learned to hold a king in thrall, setting with her endless invention an unsurpassable example for all storytellers across the ages. Liberated and mischievous, Codrescu's Sheherezade is as charming as she is shrewd—and so is the story Codrescu tells.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist, poet, and NPR commentator Codrescu (The Poetry Lesson) displays his usual unorthodox intellect in this interpretation of the tale of Sheherezade. He opens with a series of quotations from earlier recountings and interpretations, ending with this: "Sharyar (the sultan) is the spectator par excellence" whose violence is controlled by "Shezz the Telly." Codrescu posits Sheherezade as a "proto-feminist" who volunteered to marry the sultan to end his brutal habit of marrying virgins, deflowering them, and executing them the next morning. Codrescu takes issue with scholar Husain Haddawy's acclaimed 1990 translation of the tales because it underscores the Arabic national character of stories that, according to Codrescu, can belong to no one culture or religion. For Codrescu, stories, and the curiosity that propels them, belong to all humanity. Sex, mystery, curiosity, and imagination are linked in Codrescu's narrative, and he finds them lacking in a brief critique of today's media-driven world. Salacious, irreverent, and impious, Codrescu's modern version of the classic, accompanied by his commentary in more than 100 footnotes, may disquiet some readers, while others will enjoy his humor and insights into storytelling devices.
