As a child living in the English countryside, a constant stream of people turned up at Tahir Shah's family home, all in search of his father - the writer and thinker Idries Shah. Among them were literary giants, including the classicist Robert Graves, Nobel laureate Doris Lessing, and the celebrated American novelist, J. D. Salinger. On one occasion when Salinger had just departed, Tahir asked why the author of The Catcher in the Rye wrote books at all. His father responded by saying: 'Salinger writes because if he stops he'll turn to stone.' Inspired by this quote, The Reason to Write is an account of Tahir's journey through the trials and tribulations of what it is to be an author. Describing the ins and outs of the literary world by charting his own experiences, Tahir calls into question the established norms of a publishing system most of us take for granted. A book of exceptional insight, The Reason to Write is packed with tips for budding authors, examples of what has worked and not worked, and an appreciation of how best to navigate the ever-turbulent waters of the literary trade. The overriding message of this often-hilarious literary cornucopia is simple: authors should write for themselves, and keep control - which means never selling out, no matter how appealing the lure. As a bestselling writer, whose forty or more books have been translated into dozens of languages the world over, Tahir Shah is regarded as one of the most original authors working today. The Reason to Write established him as a preeminent expert on the literary arts, as well as a forecaster of the fast-changing landscape of things to come.

The Reason to Write

Reference

Shah, Tahir

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

Secretum Mundi Ltd

When his stage show goes spectacularly wrong, celebrated magician Harry Singh, a.k.a. The Great Maharaja Malipasse, becomes a laughing-stock and outcast. Having resorted to two-bit performances in the pouring rain on Blackpool Pier, the down-on-his-luck conjurer is talked into travelling to India by his best friend and assistant, Bitu, in an effort to restore their luck. After twists and turns, the pair find themselves at the Kumbh Mela. Billed as the greatest religious event in human history, it's teeming with pilgrims and mountebanks, gurus, and godmen. Through a simple misunderstanding, Harry finds himself being attended to by a clutch of earnest devotees. The more he begs them to leave him alone, the more they believe he's a genuine healer, rather than what he is - a washed-up stage magician. Before Harry and Bitu know it, they're running an immensely successful ashram in the sacred city of Varanasi. Their multi-million-dollar operation draws devotees from across India and the world - all of them desperate to get a glimpse of Harry's new incarnation... His Celestial Highness Sri Omo-ji. Inspired by true-life events, and at times reminiscent of Monty Python's Life of Brian, Tahir Shah's brilliant novella, Godman, is in many ways a cautionary tale. Making use of first-hand knowledge of Indian illusion and magicians (described in his travelogue Sorcerer's Apprentice), the book holds a mirror to society, questioning why we feel it necessary to venerate certain people, in place of thinking for ourselves.

Godman

Literature & Fiction

Humor & Satire

For a thousand nights, ruthless King Shahriyar weds a new bride at dusk, only to have her executed the following dawn. Fearing for their lives, the kingdom's young women are in hiding, or have already fled. 
A request arrives for Scheherazade, the wise and beautiful daughter of the chief vizier, to be married to the cruel and cold-blooded king. But rather than flee, she accepts the invitation. 
Having received instructions from the friendly Blue Witch, Scheherazade is wed to the king. In the royal apartment, an hourglass is turned, the falling grains of sand marking the last hours of her life. Rather than resigning herself to fate, Scheherazade does something none of the other brides dared to do... 
She begins to tell a story. 
Casting a pinch of magic dust into the brazier, the tale she spins comes to life in the fire's flames. At first, all is well, and the king is amused. But, suddenly, the story goes awry - thrown off-kilter by a spell cast by King Shahriyar's own magician. 
Scheherazade finds herself magically transported to a distant desert caravanserai, where she is joined by three others - Sindbad the Sailor, Aladdin, and Ali Baba. The lives of all four depend on getting the story back on track. And the only way to do that is to locate the story's seed - the seed of The Thousand and One Nights. 
A fabulous tale of mystery, magic, and a daring quest, The Arabian Nights Adventures throws together the main protagonists from the greatest and most important collection of stories ever assembled. 
An award-winning writer, storyteller, and expert in The Thousand and One Nights, Tahir Shah brings the ancient treasury of tales to life in a vibrant new way, recalibrating it for the time in which we live.

The Arabian Nights Adventures

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Fantasy

A titan of the Victorian age, Sir Richard Francis Burton was a scholar, linguist, explorer, and swordsman - and was feted as one of the most important British polymaths ever to have lived. Having spent much of his adult life in Arabia, Burton was deeply fascinated not only by the dialects and folklore of the region, but also by lesser known points of culture - of the kind regarded as absolutely scandalous in the moralistic drawing rooms of polite Victorian society. In the last decade of his life, Sir Richard hunkered down, and made a fresh translation of Alf Layla wa Layla, The Thousand and One Nights - publishing it in the longest and most eccentric edition ever known. Running to seventeen weighty volumes and released by private subscriptions so as to circumvent the strict laws of decency, Burton's Arabian Nights contained thousands of footnotes. So as to make the outrageous subject matter a little less apparent, many were couched in exceedingly abstruse language. A work of art in their own right, these beguiling annotations offer a dazzling insight into Arabian society, as well into the idiosyncrasies of Sir Richard's own mind. Preoccupied as he is with The Arabian Nights, bestselling author Tahir Shah set himself the task of distilling a selection of the most intriguing footnotes down into a single mesmerizing volume. Taking its title from an especially curious note on the possibility of achieving coital congress with a crocodile, this collection is a work of wonder, and is set to be as greatly appreciated as Burton's monumental translation of The Thousand and One Nights.

Congress With a Crocodile

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Travels With Myself is a dazzling collection of selected writings by bestselling travel writer and novelist, Tahir Shah. Written over twenty years, the pieces form an eclectic treasury of stories from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and beyond. Some consider the lives of women in society - both in East and West. The women-only police stations of Brazil, for instance, as well as the female inmates waiting to die on America's death row, or the young widows who clear landmines for a living in northern Cambodia. More still consider Morocco, where Shah and his family resided for many years in a mansion set squarely in the middle of a sprawling Casablanca shantytown. Yet more reflect on the oddities and contradictions of the modern world, such as why, in India each summer, hundreds of thousands line up to swallow live fish; or how the Model T Ford sounded the death knell of lavish Edwardian ostrich-feather hats. Regarded as a brilliantly original writer, Tahir Shah has gained a worldwide following by perceiving the lands through which he travels with a lens honed to detail. Questioning everything he observes, Shah taps down to a bedrock of wonder which most writers and travellers don't even realise exists.

Travels With Myself

Literary

With communication faster and easier than it's ever been, we are better informed than ever about cultures from every corner of the earth. But rather than merely observing other societies - from books, documentaries, and internet sites - award-winning author Tahir Shah believes we must learn about them in a deep-down way. As he says, 'Only by studying the ancient methods of cultures that have endured for millennia do we have a hope of solving the problems we ourselves face.' Our society is constantly bombarded with trials and tribulations of all kinds - dilemmas that never existed before globalization propelled us into the frantic 'hyper zone' in which we live. Perhaps most worrying of all is that the predicaments and problems that face us are now endemic in fragile cultures that we have influenced and changed. The fascinating papers in Cultural Research illustrate a sense and a sensibility that we have lost, but which we can and must re-learn. Through reading of the experiences of others, we can understand our own society and the challenges it faces - so as to seek answers, not only to our own problems, but to those of the wider world.

Cultural Research

Travel

First published thirty years ago, The Middle East Bedside Book illuminates lesser-known facets of Arab culture and folklore, presenting the region from the inside out. Considering the observations of writers, artists, philosophers and kings, the book is an invaluable and spellbinding resource. All manner of areas are covered - from the origins of chess as a courtly game in battle strategy, to costume, politics, music, and even the history and folklore of the humble toothpick. The contribution of Arab knowhow on the world around us is a theme running through The Middle East Bedside Book. Breakthroughs during the so-called 'Golden Age' of the Abbasids shaped the technologies we take for granted - whether they be in the fields of mathematics, medicine, or computer science. The treasury offers a cornucopia of unlikely insights - such as the way Chaucer, Shakespeare, Churchill, and many others, drew liberally for inspiration from Arab literature. Perhaps most remarkable of all are the sections of facts and fallacies. King John of England, for instance, supposedly offered to convert to Islam and hand over fealty of his kingdom in return for support from the Moors. The British Museum holds in its collection an eighth-century gold dinar from the rule of King Offa of Mercia, bearing the Arabic inscription 'There is no God but Allah', and the eleventh-century Persian poet and philosopher Hakim Sanai propounded theories on dreams and dreaming 900 years before Freud.

The Middle East Bedside Book

World Literature

Over the last thirty years, Tahir Shah has roamed the furthest limits of the world, and produced a stupefying body of travel literature, embracing a cornucopia of quests. 
He has sought out the so-called Birdmen of Peru, studied magic with the godmen of India, searched for the mysterious lost city of the Incas, and for the fabled lost treasure of Mughal India. 
Shah has noted that seeking out the hidden underbelly of the lands through which he travels is centrally important to him. The themes of zigzagging adventure, spontaneity, and walking a path that's utterly original are found throughout his travelogues. 
As far as Shah is concerned, 'Travel itself is not only the destination, but the greatest teacher, confidant, and friend. Forward movement enables a mysterious kind of alchemy to occur, in which the mind is freed from the restrictions and biases of daily life.' 
Wide-ranging in scope, The Tahir Shah Travel Reader contains full-length chapters from many of the bestselling books that have made Shah's name. They include chapters from - 
Beyond the Devil's Teeth 
Cultural Research 
House of the Tiger King 
In Arabian Nights 
In Search of King Solomon's Mines 
Journey Through Namibia 
Sorcerer's Apprentice 
Three Essays 
The Caliph's House 
The Clockmaker's Box 
The Reason to Write 
Trail of Feathers 
Travels With Myself 
Travels With Nasrudin

The Tahir Shah Travel Reader

The first book in Tahir Shah's trilogy of Nasrudin stories, The Misadventures of the Mystifying Nasrudin builds on his highly acclaimed travelogue - Travels With Nasrudin. Having been raised in a household in which the wise fool of Oriental folklore was regarded both as an honorary member of the family, and as a problem solver par excellence, Shah was encouraged from an early age to regard the world around him through the lens of Nasrudin's humour. This collection of hilarious original stories - charting the globetrotting travels of Nasrudin from Seattle to Samarkand, and from Cairo to Bangkok, turns the world inside out and upside down.

The Misadventures of the Mystifying Nasrudin

The second book in Tahir Shah's trilogy of Nasrudin stories, The Peregrinations of the Perplexing Nasrudin follows hot on the heels of The Misadventures of the Mystifying Nasrudin, and the highly acclaimed Travels With Nasrudin. Although uproariously funny, Nasrudin tales are regarded as complex psychological machineries in their own right - the kind of tales that have simultaneously provided laughter and problem-solving for centuries across Oriental lands. A random selection of Nasrudin's travels - through the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia - The Peregrinations act on many levels, providing wisdom, humour, and a full inside-out recalibration of the mind.

The Peregrinations of the Perplexing Nasrudin

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