Tutinama: Tales of a Parrot — The Complete Fifty-Two Nights of Ziya al-Din Nakhshabi, A New English Rendering

Fifty-two nights. One clever parrot.When the merchant Maymun sails away on business, he leaves his young wife Khujasta in the care of a parrot that cost a thousand dinars. Each night she rises to go to her lover — and each night the bird begins a story too good to leave unfinished: chess-playing monkeys, laughing fish, jackals dyed indigo and crowned as kings, snakes that pay their debts, saints, swindlers, and queens — until dawn itself becomes the story's last line.Completed in 1330 by the Sufi physician Ziya al-Din Nakhshabi, the Tutinama ("Tales of a Parrot") is one of the great story-cycles of the Persianate world — sister to the Thousand and One Nights and ancestor of a hundred tales told since. Two centuries later, the young emperor Akbar had it illustrated by the founding masters of Mughal painting.This collector's edition presents the complete fifty-two nights in fresh, readable modern English — every tale, every verse, and Nakhshabi's own farewell — in a large 8.25 x 11 hardcover illustrated with twenty-three full-page, full-color plates from the celebrated manuscript made for Akbar around 1560, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. With an introduction on the work's history, its author, and its painters. Read more