A Buzzfeed Best Book of the Year

“Yasmine Seale has brought Aladdin back to life: she captures the grace and the strangeness of the version collected and written down by Antoine Galland in the eighteenth century, and has found unexpected riches of fine, sly, parodic humor in a story which has suffered in its long, twisting history from manhandling, truncation, and an excess of pomp and ceremony. This is a fresh, witty, and vigorous retelling.”

— Marina Warner

“Yasmine Seale's vivacious prose resurrects a classic folktale that we thought we knew, and animates it with deeper meanings. This book is a superb example of translation as an art form.”

— Pankaj Mishra

“Yasmine Seale makes a tale that is almost too familiar new again in her smooth, dark, exciting interpretation of Aladdin.”

— Amanda Hanoosh Steinberg

“This exhilarating translation will thrill fans of darker, more complex fairy tales and upend readers’ preconceived image of Aladdin.”

— Publishers Weekly

“Darker, grubbier, and more twisted than its Disneyfied iteration”

— The New Yorker

“A wide-ranging, learned, and insightful introduction to a newly translated classic is followed by a really compelling and readable text—and Yasmine Seale’s performance here is just stunning.”

— Public Books

“An elaborate poetic tapestry so glamorous and delightful that you can’t help but want to read again.”

— The Paris Review

“Sparkling.... Seale’s elegant new translation restores the tale to its roots.”

— BookPage

“Excellent”

— Washington Post