A famous collection of Perso-Arabic folk tales The Arabian Nights is a collection of Perso-Arabic folk tales and other stories. The Arabian Nights Entertainments, selected and edited by Andrew Lang, was first published in 1898 Andrew Lang (1844-1912) was a polymath. He is best known today either for the twelve color fairy books that bear his name or for his periodical writings, though he was also a poet, a translator of Homer, a historian and biographer, a scholar with interests in myth and anthropology, and the author of various works of fiction.