Paulo Lemos Horta discusses his book, Marvellous Thieves, that recovers the cross-cultural encounters—the collaborations, borrowings, and acts of literary larceny—that produced the Arabian Nights in European languages. Ranging from the coffeehouses of Aleppo to the salons of Paris, from colonial Calcutta to Bohemian London, Paulo Lemos Horta introduces readers to the poets and scholars, pilgrims and charlatans who made crucial but largely unacknowledged contributions to this most famous of story collections. Paulo Lemos Horta is an Assistant Professor of Literature at New York University Abu Dhabi. T. Austin Graham is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia.
Event co-sponsored by the Columbia Maison Française and Department of English and Comparative Literature.