1001 Years of 1001 Nights (CD)

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The fanciful tales of sultans, djinns, wise women and caliphs ascribed to the legendary queen Scheherazade are collectively known as Alf Laylah wa-Laylah, A Thousand Nights and One Night. Throughout the last millennium, storytellers have carried these enduring stories around the world, expanding and adapting them to new languages and cultures and creating an international family of timeless tales.

In this album, award-winning storyteller Mary Grace Ketner recounts Scheherazade’s own story, along with three of the 1001 tales the legendary Persian princess told to her sister/accomplice Dinrazade to enchant and disarm her murderous husband, the sultan Sharyar.

Included are Scheherazade’s best-loved “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” along with two living descendents of her ancient accounts: “The Peddler of Swaffham” and “Old Dry Fry” have been passed orally from one generation to the next to this very day, years and oceans away from their roots in ancient Persia (Sheherazade’s “The Ruined Man Made Rich by a Dream” and “Tale of the Hunchback”).

The cover design, a vintage illustration by Frances Virginia Sterrett ffom a 1928 edition of Arabian Nights, is entitled “Scheherazade went on with her story”―just as she goes on today in the warm and passionate voice of Mary Grace Ketner.

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