The Arabian Nights edited by Kate Douglas Wiggans & Nora A. Smith, 339 pages

 This elegant edition of 10 classic tales of The Arabian Nights features a powerful introduction by Mark Helprin, offering new insight into the "thousand mercurial forms" and "inexact nature" of these Eastern tales. Helprin probes for fresh understanding of our culture's deep engagement with these fantastical imaginings which, after being passed along orally for thousands of years, evolved into what we have come to know as The Arabian Nights. Accompanied by 12 full-color Maxfield Parrish illustrations from the 1909 edition, the wondrous narrative that began in what is now the Middle East and spread outward to encompass the globe is here reborn in an edition expertly translated by Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora A. Smith. The stories here include Aladdin which tells of an aimless street urchin who is seduced by the wiles of a magician and finds himself trapped in a cave filled with sumptuous jewels, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves in which a poor man discovers the secret lair of a band of looters, and The Talking Bird, the Singing Tree, and the Golden Water the story of two princes and a princess who are stolen from their parents at birth and raised by a kindly gardener.