We begin where the Nights begins: with a king who has stopped trusting stories and a storyteller who bets her life that he can be taught to listen again. Read Husain Haddawy's Prologue closely — the betrayals of Shahrayar and Shahzaman, the demon and the woman who collects the rings, and the vizier's daughter Shahrazad, who volunteers for a marriage that has become a death sentence. Haddawy translates Muhsin Mahdi's edition of the oldest substantial manuscript of the Nights, a fourteenth-century Syrian text, so the voice you hear this week is about as close as English gets to the medieval work. Then read the first two story cycles: The Merchant and the Demon, in which three old men each ransom a portion of the merchant's blood with a tale, and The Fisherman and the Demon. As you read, keep a running list of every scene in which one character tells a story to another. Who tells? Who listens? What is the story meant to buy? These are ransom tales — narrative offered in exchange for a life — and the frame teaches us to read every tale in the book that way. Two questions to carry into seminar. First, why does Shahrazad's plan work: what exactly does a story do to Shahrayar, night after night, that argument, wealth, or pleading could not? Second, notice that the tales are nested — tellers inside tales inside tales. What does that structure claim about where stories come from and who owns them? Essay 1 grows directly out of this week's reading, so annotate as you go: every passage you mark now is a quotation you will not have to hunt for later.