Scheherazade in popular culture
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Scheherazade has been featured in various cultural works:
- Scheherazade, Op. 35, is a symphonic suite composed by the Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1888, and is based on The Book of One Thousand and One Nights.
- Scheherazade (1902), is a set of three poems for voice and orchestra by the French composer Maurice Ravel.
- Stephenie Meyer, in her novel New Moon, refers to Scheherazade when Bella Swan, the protagonist of her Twilight saga, says, "I hoped... I could buy a few more hours with him at some later time -- spin this out for another night, Scheherazade-style."[1]
- Peter Cetera's 3rd solo album One More Story (1988) contains a song named Scheherazade. In the song, Cetera tells the story of an unhappy Arabian King who is bored with all his riches and harem of dancing girls but once he lays his eyes on Scheherazade, he suddenly becomes entranced by her and makes her his queen. Background vocals were performed by Madonna.
- "The Magic of Scheherazade" is a 1989 video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) by Culture Brain, Inc.
- Scheherazade and Other Stories is a 1975 album by the rock/folk group Renaissance
- The Riddles of Scheherazade is a book of logic puzzles by Raymond M. Smullyan.
- The Magic: The Gathering card game features a card called Shahrazad, the art of which depicts the queen. The card's rules causes the players to play a game-within-a-game that extends the gameplay time, much like Scheherazade told stories-within-a-story to extend her lifetime.
- In his novel Chimera, John Barth evokes Scheherazade and becomes her muse as she becomes his.
- In Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, the narrator repeatedly compares his own tales of his life to Scheherazade's, and mentions that he can't "count on having even a thousand nights and a night" (page 4) in which to tell them.
- In the Vertigo graphic novel Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall, Snow White takes the role of Scheherazade and tells background stories about the inhabitants of Fabletown in order to prevent her beheading at the hands of the Sultan. At the end of the book, Scheherazade makes an appearance, and Snow White tells her the secret to make sure the sultan doesn't have her executed. "He likes stories."
- The protagonist of Stephen King's novel Misery, Paul Sheldon, frequently compares himself to Scheherazade as he writes a novel both for himself and to keep his captor from killing him.
- Kamelot's song 'Nights of Arabia' from the album The Fourth Legacy describes the story of Scheherazade.
- "Scheherazade" is the title of a poem in John Ashbery's book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.
- "Scheherazade Sits" is the title of a song by filk artist Terence Chua.
- Shadow Spinner is a book written by Susan Fletcher about Shahrazad's tale through the eyes of a harem girl named Marjan.
- The Storyteller's Daughter is a novel that focuses specifically on the life of Scheherazade before and during her marriage to Shahryar
- "Scherezade" is the name of a Guymelef (mechanised robot) in the anime Escaflowne
- "Scheherazade" is the name of an unlockable bonus character in Soulcalibur IV. In battle she wields a rapier named "Alf Layla Wa Layla", the Arabic name meaning "One Thousand and One Nights".
- "Cafe Scheherazade" by Melbournian author Arnold Zable is a collection of stories told around the tables in Acland St, St Kilda's (Australia) famous Cafe Scheherazade
- ^ Meyer, Stephenie (2006). New Moon. New York: Little, Brown and Company. pp. 494–495. ISBN 0316160199.