The Arabian Nights Entertainments

It's been called The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, One Thousand and One Nights, etc., but the framework is generally the same: a Persian king discovers his wife is cheating, so, having determined that all women are unfaithful, he decides to marry a virgin every day and have her killed by the next. After a while the kingdom is running low on virgins, so the cunning Scheherazade volunteers to marry the king, and to keep her own head she tells him a new thrilling tale every night. He's so captivated by the stories that he doesn't realize it's a trick. So...Scheherazade is like the original Dan Brown.

The 1001 stories themselves were compiled over many centuries by various authors, translators, and scholars across the Middle East and North Africa. The tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian folklore and literature. Some versions only contain a few hundred stories, while others have the full 1000. The Arabian Nights is like a big bucket of folk tales. Dig in!