by Paul Nurse
A number of thanks are due. First must go to Penguin Canada, particularly David Davidar and Nicole de Montbrun, for taking a chance on a fledgling author and commissioning Eastern Dreams from a 2004 newspaper article written to commemorate the tercentenary of Antoine Galland’s Mille et une nuits.
In no way second are my editors, Susan Folkins, Diane Turbide and Justin Stoller, who individually ensured that the manuscript stayed on track and on target throughout the long gestation period, shepherding the sometimes-jumbled series of thoughts, ideas, concepts and facts into a coherent narrative. Working with them was a constant pleasure.
Various friends and colleagues either read or aided in the writing of the manuscript, among them professors T.O. Lloyd and Milton Israel, Michael Lundell, Burke Casari and Lorne Breitenlohner. John Crocker deserves a special mention for his invaluable web-page The Arabian Nights Resource Center—now sadly defunct—as well as for saving me some time and trouble by answering several questions. Still others provided support or encouragement in sundry ways, including Professor R. W. Beachey, Richard and Toshiko Hayes, Robert W. Smith; my mother, Marilyn Nurse; and others too numerous to mention, but who know who they are.
Permission to use the copyrighted photograph of the Alf Laila Fragment is courtesy of the University of Chicago’s famed Oriental Institute Museum.
More oblique thanks go to those innumerable figures whose lives have been touched in some way by the Nights since its beginnings during Islam’s Golden Age. Some of these names appear in the text with due recognition, but many others remain forever anonymous—especially those who in some unknowing way contributed to the creation of The Thousand and One Nights by the simple act of either telling or reciting its many stories. Whoever they were, are or will be, “Peace be unto their names.”
