Damascus Nights - Softcover

A timely, redesigned reissue of Rafik Schami?s award-winning novel. In the classical Arab tradition of tale-telling, here is a magical book that celebrates the power of storytelling, delightfully transformed for modern sensibilities by an award-winning author. The time is present-day Damascus, and Salim the coachman, the city?s most famous storyteller, is mysteriously struck dumb. To break the spell, seven friends gather for seven nights to present Salim with seven wondrous ?gifts??seven stories of their own design. Upon this enchanting frame of tales told in the fragrant Arabian night, the words of the past grow fainter, as ancient customs are yielding to modern turmoil. While the hairdresser, the teacher, the wife of the locksmith sip their tea and pass the water pipe, they swap stories about the magical and the mundane: about djinnis and princesses, about contemporary politics and the difficulties of bargaining in a New York department store. And as one tale leads to another? and another? all of Damascus appears before your eyes, along with a vision of storytelling?and talk?as the essence of friendship, of community, of life. A sly and graceful work, a delight to readers young and old, Damascus Nights is, according to Publishers Weekly, ?a highly atmospheric, pungent narrative.?

Rafik Schami

Rafik Schami was born in Damascus, Syria, in 1946 where his family has lived for generations. He was supposed to be a baker, but decided instead to become a chemist. In 1971, at the age of seventeen, he emigrated to Germany where he worked in factories and department stores, restaurants and construction until he received his doctorate in chemistry in 1979. "I thought I would rather be a chemist," he says, "and discover a formula for immortality, but instead I discovered that only literature makes one live forever." After seventeen years, Schami gave up his work as a chemist and began a writing career. He claims to be "working on the immortality question. You see," he says. "I can't stand death."

Storytelling is a deep-rooted tradition in Syrian culture, and Schami feels particularly drawn to it. He loves to tell stories aloud and thrives on watching the transformation in his listeners as they leave the world of their thoughts and begin to travel with him. "This moment of magic fills me with a peculiar sort of happiness," he says. To him, there is no better payment.

Schami feels that he has a special kinship to children. He believes that it is the child inside of us who loves to hear stories; he claims it is only the child in us who can enter the fictional world. "An adult who has stifled the child within," Schami says, "cannot hear stories."

He says he once dreamed that his writing would have a great effect upon society. Since then, his goals have grown more modest. He says now, "I simply want to outwit death for a few more years. But I have a trick. I try to write so well that my books and my voice will live for a long time. This will make Death absolutely furious."

Schami is now a successful children's book author and a professional storyteller in the Syrian tradition. A Hand Full of Stars, a child's book published in 1991, was a winner of the Mildred D. Batchelder Award. He lives in Germany where he works as a freelance writer.

Reading Group Discussion Points
Other Books With Reading Group Guides