Night time storytelling

As part of the research for the book I'm thinking about fixing to get ready to write, I borrowed a wonderful book from my brother-in-law who's an artist and a bit of a pack rat--he has a home crammed with many wonderful beautiful things, many of which he's created. The book is the Arabian Nights, published in 1928 and illustrated by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1901-1931).

We all, sort of, know the Arabian Nights or The Thousand And One Nights. The stories include the tale of Aladdin and other familiar characters, and are told by the intrepid Scheherezade who had the misfortune to marry a king who, after his first wife was unfaithful, beheaded all subsequent brides after the wedding night. He'd gone through three thousand until he married Scheherezade, who had the smarts to tell him a cliffhanger story, and so he kept her alive, night after night, to see what happened next. For a thousand nights she enthralled him and managed to have three sons in between (we suppose) storytelling. By then the king had fallen in love with her and made her his official queen, and she got to keep her head.

I love the image of the wily woman weaving and spinning words to survive. Although the tales are generally presented now as children's stories, I loved the Penguin edition I read, and of course lost, years ago--the unexpurgated, sexy version. The most famous translator was Sir Richard Burton, but I don't believe the stories were known in the Regency period, despite the fascination with the exotic.

What also thrilled me about them was the structure--the book starts with Scheherazade telling her first story and then story builds upon story; characters launch into their own tales, and so do their characters, and so on. That, I thought, was what narrative should be, and I stored that thought for, uh, several decades, until now. Complex, labyrinthine story telling fired by sex and death--well, what more could you ask for?

We've talked about early influences, but have you read anything where the formal structure fired you up as much as the words and stories themselves? Or have you read a good, adult translation of the Arabian Nights that you'd recommend?