Our foremost theorist of myth, fairytales, and folktales explores the magical realm of the imagination where carpets fly, objects speak, dreams reveal hidden truths, and genies grant prophetic wishes. Stranger Magic examines the wondrous tales of the Arabian Nights, their profound impact on the West, and the progressive exoticization of magic since the eighteenth century, when the first European translations appeared. The Nights seized European readers' imaginations during the siècle des Lumières, inspiring imitations, spoofs, turqueries, extravaganzas, pantomimes, and mauresque tastes in dress and furniture. Writers from Voltaire to Goethe to Borges, filmmakers from Raoul Walsh on, and countless authors of children's books have adapted its stories. What gives these tales their enduring power to bring pleasure to readers and audiences? Their appeal, Marina Warner suggests, lies in how the stories' magic stimulates the creative activity of the imagination. Their popularity during the Enlightenment was no accident: dreams, projections, and fantasies are essential to making the leap beyond the frontiers of accepted knowledge into new scientific and literary spheres. The magical tradition, so long disavowed by Western rationality, underlies modernity's most characteristic developments, including the charmed states of brand-name luxury goods, paper money, and psychoanalytic dream interpretation. In Warner's hands, the Nights reveal the underappreciated cultural exchanges between East and West, Islam and Christianity, and cast light on the magical underpinnings of contemporary experience, where mythical principles, as distinct from religious belief, enjoy growing acceptance. These tales meet the need for enchantment, in the safe guise of oriental costume. Stranger Magic is a large volume, and it can sometimes be difficult not to get disoriented . . . However, one of the merits of the book is that it teaches us why getting lost now and again can be salutary . . . Stranger Magic reveals that the fate of the human spirit hangs not by a single thread, but by an extravagant skein of fancy. —George Prochnik If we might forget how central [ The Arabian Nights ] tales are to our culture, Marina Warner's wondrous Stranger Magic is a scholarly excursion around some of the stories, her mind as rich and fascinating as the stories themselves, taking us on a magic carpet from Borges and Goethe, to Edward Said and the movies. (Hanif Kureishi The Guardian 2011-11-26) Stranger Magic is an enormous work, 436 densely erudite and eclectic pages plus another hundred of glossaries and notes. In its relentless connecting up of diverse stories, from the Inferno to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials , it's reminiscent of Christopher Booker's brick-sized Seven Basic Plots . Warner's chapters, allocated into five parts, are beautifully illustrated and interspersed with 15 tales concisely retold... Stranger Magic is a scholarly work that often reads like a fireside conversation. It's encyclopedic, a book to be savored in slices. (Robin Yassin-Kassab The Guardian 2011-11-12) [A] wide-ranging, erudite, wondrously polymathic exploration of the tales of magic, bound to the "huge narrative wheel" with which Scheherazade enchanted the Sultan Shahryar through one thousand and one nights of storytelling. Warner, too, is a beguiling storyteller: her fascination with true knowledge embedded in realms of wonder. She releases the jinn of cultural modernism and scientific progress from the bottle in which it has been long confined by Western tradition. (Iain Finlayson The Times 2011-11-05) Wonderful...Warner is herself something of a Shahrazad, though she weaves her account under less threatening auspices...Many of the stories in the Nights take place in a legendary Baghdad or draw on older Persian sources, but a few--such as the story of Hayqar the Wise--date back to ancient Egyptian tales from the seventh century BC. Warner is alert to these earlier echoes but she is more interested in the far-reaching cultural and literary impact of the Nights on artists, composers and writers...From Voltaire and Goethe to Hans Christian Andersen and William Beckford down to Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino--on all of whom Warner offers illuminating discussions--the influence of the Nights has been pervasive; but composers (such as Mozart), artists and designers, illustrators and film-makers have also fallen under their spell. (Eric Ormsby Literary Review 2011-12-01) My favorite work of non-fiction this year was Marina Warner's Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights . In her exploration of this immense, protean and much-translated Arabic collection of folk and fairy tales (fifteen of them banded in here at intervals) she has found a subject which seems an ideal fit for her own particular cast of mind. This book is like one of the densely patterned carpets it describes, rich in overlapping narrative strand