A genre-bending novel of 1001 nights of no-holds-barred, pre-code
American movies distilled into a single fevered dreamworld.
Arabian Nights of 1934 is a journey through the fevered dreamworld
embodied in American movies of the early 1930s: an era that closed
abruptly with the enforcement of the Production Code in July 1934. It
distills a thousand and one nights of Depression-era
movie-going--plotlines, closeups, cityscapes, wisecracks, backchat, and
frantic outbursts--into a haunting parallel life, the stories bleeding
into one another as they did in the minds of the viewers whom they
helped sustain.
Two of those viewers, it so happens, are O'Brien's own parents in their
restless youth--one impatient to experience the world beyond the screen,
one ready to take it on--and the glimpse we're afforded into the
darkened theaters of their minds frames the book with an act of
imagination at once tender and audacious.