New Arabian Nights (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

By Robert Louis Stevenson

Published in book form in 1882, these stories first appeared in magazines from 1877 to 1880. The first part consists of “The Suicide Club,” and “The Rajah’s Diamond;” stories that detail the exotic adventures of Prince Florizel of Bohemia and his associate Colonel Geraldine. Tales from the second part include “A Lodging for the Night,” Stevenson’s first published story, and “The Pavilion on the Links,” praised by Arthur Conan Doyle as the “high-water mark of Stevenson’s genius.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Apr 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9781411441941

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850, the only son of an engineer, Thomas Stevenson. Despite a lifetime of poor health, Stevenson was a keen traveller, and his first book An Inland Voyage (1878) recounted a canoe tour of France and Belgium. In 1880, he married an American divorcee, Fanny Osbourne, and there followed Stevenson's most productive period, in which he wrote, amongst other books, Treasure Island (1883), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Kidnapped (both 1886). In 1888, Stevenson left Britain in search of a more salubrious climate, settling in Samoa, where he died in 1894.

Reviews for New Arabian Nights (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

[stbalbach_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A collection of short stories written by Stevenson before he became famous, published in various magazines in the late 1870s, includes his first published fiction. Composed of two "books", the first book is a series of nested inter-related stories of diverse topics - thus the allusion to the "Arabian Knights" whose stories were also nested (other than that no connection). These stories are sometimes called the first modern English short stories, and the "nesting" technique was very cutting edge. The Suicide Club was made into a movie called "The Game of Death".

[gibbon_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

George Sampson, who introduced this undated edition of Stevenson's stories, was careful to draw attention to what he saw as their faults of construction; but for all that, they are attractive and interesting to read more than a century after they were written. Conan Doyle and Chesterton may well have learned from Stevenson's storytelling technique - the master criminal and his opponent still have the power to draw us into the fast-moving events. Of the other stories, "The Sieur de Maletroit's Door" with its vivid evocation of a medieval past in which well-born women were, in theory at least, completely at the disposal of their male guardians, retains its power to involve the reader.