Sadly, of the Hazar Afsaneh itself not a single copy survives. This book is the great “missing link” of world literature, the fabled volume through which the wonder tales of India traveled west to encounter, eventually, the Arabic language and to turn into The Thousand Nights and One Night,

Grass’s co-opting of animal fables, his extensive use of talking flounders, rats, and toads, grows from his absorption in the wonder tales of Germany, as collected by the Brothers Grimm.

Madame Bovary and a flying carpet are both untrue, and, what’s more, they are both untrue in the same way. Somebody made them up. I’m in favor of continuing to make things up. Only by unleashing the fictionality of fiction, the imaginativeness of the imagination, the dream songs of our dreams, can we hope to approach the new, and to create fiction

This is the beauty of the wonder tale and its descendant, fiction: that one can simultaneously know that the story is a work of imagination, which is to say untrue, and believe it to contain profound truth. The boundary between the magical and the real, at such moments, ceases to exist.

there is nothing that swims, crawls, walks, or flies that tells stories. Man alone is the storytelling animal.

Animal fables—including talking-dead-fish fables—have been among the most enduring tales in the Eastern canon, and the best of them, unlike, say, the fables of Aesop, are amoral. They don’t seek to preach about humility or modesty or moderation or honesty or abstinence. They do not guarantee the triumph of virtue. As a result, they seem remarkably

The children fell in love with stories easily and lived in stories too; they made up play stories every day, they stormed castles and conquered nations and sailed the ocean blue, and at night their dreams were full of dragons. They were all storytellers now, makers of stories as well as receivers of stories. But they went on growing up and slowly t

Yet their power endures; and it does so, I believe, because for all their cargo of monsters and magic, these stories are entirely truthful about human nature (even when in the form of anthropomorphic animals). All human life is here, brave and cowardly, honorable and dishonorable, straight-talking and conniving, and the stories ask the greatest and

But I mourn the loss of the Hazar Afsaneh, which would, if rediscovered, complete the story of the stories, and what a find that would be. Perhaps it would solve a mystery at the heart of the frame story, or rather at the very end of it, and answer a question I’ve been asking myself for some years: Did Scheherazade and her sister, Dunyazad, finally