"It's a blessing & a curse being this hot.."

Illustration for '1001 Nights' by Kay Nielsen, 1976 A Young Thief The Fisherman and the Genie The Lovers perish in the Fire The Favourite Wife smuggles a young man in the Harmen in a Box Sheherazade offers to marry the Sultan

'Consider Scheherazade, whose name meant "city-born" and who was without a doubt a big-city girl, crafty, wisecracking, by turns sentimental and cynical, as contemporary a metropolitan narrator as one could wish to meet. Scheherazade, who snared the prince in her never-ending story. Scheherazade, telling stories to save her life, setting fiction against death, a Statue of Liberty built not of metal but of words. Scheherazade, who insisted, against her father's will, on taking her place in the procession into the king's deadly boudoir. Scheherazade, who set herself the heroic task of saving her sisters by taming the king. Who had faith, who must have had faith, in the man beneath the murderous monster and in her own ability to restore him to his true humanity, by telling him stories.'