Customer Reviews

New Arabian Nights

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This is not a review of the content of the book, rather I'd like to comment on the publishing quality. This book is an "instabook", which I assume to mean that it is printed after it is ordered. There doesn't seem to be any mention of this on the book description page on Amazon. The results of this "instabook" printing are as follows: low quality paper cover and pages; sloppy cut on the exposed edges of the book; numerous typos - averaging 1 per 1.5 pages; misalignment of paragraphs sometimes cutting words in half. All this would be acceptable if the intent of this book and others like it was to deliver classic books at a very affordable price. But! for [the price] it is a complete RIPOFF!

At the heart of the book are the six (or two, depending on how you count) stories about Prince Florizel ... these stories if any capture something of what "The Arabian Nights" would have been if it had been written in the nineteenth century. The central character is an impossibly noble and high-minded Prince Florizel, who the author appears to believe in with the utmost seriousness - at least until the very end. They tend to begin with a mystery so intriguing that it doesn't even matter if the solution is less brilliant than we would have thought. "Ruritanian romance" is the best description. Ruritania itself is not so Ruritanian as this.

The non-Florizel stories are none of them favourites of mine - which is merely to say that I don't rank them up there with, say, "The Bottle Imp". All of Stevenson's short fiction is worth reading.