I dust off my Arabic for some weird scenes in Silk Road–era Baghdad: a story of drugs and ego death, deadly secrets and the workers who keep them. The only tragic love story in the Nights, the story of the Persian prince Ibn Bakkār and the courtesan Shams-al-Nahār also features, only in this earliest available Arabic manuscript tradition, a meta-narrative device whereby first-person interviews with certain characters—such as would be collected by a prosecutor as evidence for a trial—are interspersed throughout this story of elite parties, exotic drugs, and forbidden obsessions.

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