One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of fairy tales in Arabic, united by a framing story about the cruel king Shahryar, who took a new wife every evening and killed her in the morning. The history of the Arabian Nights is still far from clear; its origins are lost in the depths of centuries. The tales of “A Thousand and One Nights” are characterized by an entertaining plot, a bizarre interweaving of the fantastic and the real, vivid pictures of urban life in the medieval Arab East, fascinating descriptions of amazing countries, the liveliness and depth of experiences of the heroes of fairy tales, psychological justification of situations, clear definite morality. The language of many of the stories is magnificent - lively, imaginative, rich, devoid of circumlocutions and omissions. This edition includes only selected tales from the complete collection of “One Thousand and One Nights”, as well as those not included in the complete collection - “Ala ad-Din and the Magic Lamp” , “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and “The Caliph for an Hour, or the Story of Abu-l-Hasan the Kutil”, which were included both because of their wide popularity and because of their peculiar combination of the genres of everyday life and magic tales typical of the Thousand and One Nights.