Another one with a named translator! At this rate I'll just stop noting it at all. This one is apparently rather censored.
Summary: A prince catches his wife in bed with another man, kills them, and goes to hang with his brother. His brother's wife also cheats on him, and he also kills her. Then they go on a road trip and meet a woman who is cheating on the Efrit who is keeping her captive. They go home, and the one brother decides to just have one night stands and murder women after, until Scheherazade shows up and talks him into letting her tell him a story, which ends with a character telling a story.
Commentary: I love the entire meta concept of The Thousand and One Nights. It's one of the cleverest ways of framing what is, effectively, an anthology series. The progression from the initial Ass and Bull story between Scheherazade and her father, followed by the story of the merchant talking his way out of the Efrit killing him, which then leads to a story-within-a-story is a great way to commit to the bit from the get go. A big issue with a lot of heavily episodic/anthology style stories is how they often meander too much within unrelated internal stories before engaging with their own story. This is almost a lose-lose, since if the anthology stories are strong enough to stand on their own, then the frame story can slow things down and detract from them. If they aren't strong enough, then people won't follow long enough to get to the meta narrative. The Thousand and One Nights goes almost from the first line (after a bit of praising God/Allah that I assume was more or less requisite at the time), with a spicy soap opera cheating/murder scene on the second page. This also preemptively establishes the stakes for Scheherazade before she is even introduced. The king is very willing to kill women. In the next 10 pages we get multiple short stories that all link reasonably well to the main narrative, and the first cliffhanger. The only thing I would've liked is Scheherazade more explicitly signaling the end of night cliffhanger.
Some really weird stories, though. Not really sure why we needed that entire coda of the wife getting beat at the end of the Ass and Bull. Besides being offensive to modern sensibilities, it's just weird to tack an entire extra moral on at the end of the story. It'd be like if the Tortoise and the Hare ended with someone killing a bunch who squirrels who were watching to show you shouldn't gamble.
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