Originally published in 1907, The Nights of Tino of Baghdad is an episodic fantasia, a heady journey through landscapes that author Else Lasker-Schüler had only explored in her mind. A slim volume of sweeping imaginative scope, it sets out from the banks of the Nile before progressing through much of the Arabian world and beyond, including Morocco, Baghdad, Thebes and Constantinople. Along the way, Lasker-Schüler’s proxy Tino – ‘a poetess from Arabia’ – encounters pashas, sultans, moguls, caliphs and khedives, some pure invention, others able to claim dual citizenship of the writer’s emotional life and her imaginative realm. In bringing together Muslim and Jewish traditions, Lasker-Schüler explores the commonalities of Semitic identity, constructing a private world away from a Germany increasingly hostile to minorities. A picaresque prose poem, The Nights of Tino of Baghdad echoes imagery and motifs found in the writer’s celebrated verse, in a style that presents the raptures of love and ritualistic acts of violence in the same intoxicating blend of scripture and fairy tale.