Author @ the Library | Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights with Lawrence Weschler

• Books & Literature
• Free
• History

With Paulo Lemos Horta, Assistant Professor of Literature at New York University Abu Dhabi, in conversation with Lawrence Weschler, author of “Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative.”

This illustrated lecture reveals the cross-cultural encounters—the collaborations, borrowings, and acts of literary larceny—that produced the Arabian Nights in European languages. Ranging from the coffeehouses of Aleppo to the salons of Paris, from colonial Calcutta to Bohemian London, Paulo Lemos Horta introduces audience to the poets and scholars, pilgrims and charlatans who made crucial but largely unacknowledged contributions to this most famous of story collections.

After the talk, there is a discussion of the book with writer Lawrence Weschler, whose grandfather, the modernist composer Ernst Toch, based his final opera, “The Last Tale,” on Scheherazade’s ultimate yarn.