This original hardcover collection is set in the early days of Fabletown, long before the Fables series began. Traveling in Arabia as an ambassador from the exiled Fables community, Snow White is captured by the local sultan who wants to marry and then kill her. But the clever Snow attempts to charm the sultan instead by playing Scheherazade, telling him fantastic stories for a total of 1,001 nights.

"Probably the smartest mainstream comic going, Fables usually concentrates on the contemporary activities of characters from children's stories who now are living as secret refugees in New York. This collection gives glimpses of their individual backstories before the armies of the brutal Adversary drove them out of Fairyland. Readers will learn, for example, what spoiled the Big Bad Wolf's disposition and what happened to the witch after Hansel and Gretel pushed her into the oven. It would be relatively easy to do clever, merely cynical readings of the fairy tales, but Willingham is after something much more interesting. Like Neil Gaiman and Tanith Lee, he's reimagining the old stories, trying to see why they have survived and also to point out the aspects they somehow neglect: it's only natural that Snow White would take revenge on the seven little rapists who abducted her, but the independent way she goes about it casts doubt on her subservient relationship to Prince Charming. Willingham reminds readers of how much they ignore in their anxiety to believe that all stories end happily ever after. Artists like Charles Vess, Mark Buckingham and Jill Thompson work up to the level of the perceptive scripts, making this a memorable, uncomfortably amusing treat." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"A volume full of backstories...gets the kind of classy treatment success merits....The stories are both clever and psychologically explanatory of the characters as they appear in the ongoing, contemporarily set Fables story." Booklist

"[A] masterful collection of short stories....Fables is a landmark achievement in comics. 1001 Nights is a brilliant extension of that success....You have no excuse not to read this masterpiece anthology." IGN.com

"[P]retty much perfect....The worst thing about 1001 Nights is the page length. 140? Surely that's not the limit of Bill Willingham's supernova of an imagination?...Considering the numerous sources he's drawing from in crafting these tales, I'm optimistic that the well may never run dry. Long live Fables!" Silver Bullet Comics