Arabian Nights -- Sir Richard Burton

This book was originally written by  Hazār Afsān.

The main frame story concerns a Persian king and his new bride. The king, Shahryar, upon discovering his former wife''s infidelity had her executed and then declared all women to be unfaithful. He begins to marry a succession of virgins only to execute each one the next morning. Eventually the vizier cannot find any more virgins. Scheherazade, the vizier''s daughter, offers herself as the next bride and her father reluctantly agrees. On the night of their marriage, Scheherazade tells the king a tale, but does not end it. The king is thus forced to keep her alive in order to hear the conclusion. 

                               The next night, as soon as she finishes the tale, she begins (and only begins) another. So it went for 1,001 nights. The tales vary widely: they include historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, poems, burlesques and Muslim religious legends. Numerous stories depict djinn, magicians, and legendary places, which are often intermingled with real people and geography; the historical caliph Harun al-Rashid is a common protagonist, as are his alleged court poet Abu Nuwas and his vizier, Ja''far al-Barmaki. Sometimes a character in Scheherazade''s tale will begin telling other characters a story of his own, and that story may have another one told within it, resulting in a richly-layered narrative texture. The different versions have different individually detailed endings (in some Scheherazade asks for a pardon, in some the king sees their children and decides not to execute his wife, in some other things happen that make the king distracted) but they all end with the king giving his wife a pardon and sparing her life.

                              The narrator''s standards for what constitutes a cliffhanger seem broader than in modern literature. While in many cases a story is cut off with the hero in danger of losing his life or another kind of deep trouble, in some parts of the full text Scheherazade stops her narration in the middle of an exposition of abstract philosophical principles or complex points of Islamic philosophy, and in one case during a detailed description of human anatomy according to Galen—and in all these cases turns out to be justified in her belief that the king''s curiosity about the sequel would buy her another day of life.