Tell No Tales

Storytelling has been sold as the solution to everything. But it comes at a cost.

- PARUL SEHGAL

After a millennium, she remains the hardest-working woman in literature. It was not enough to be saddled with a husband who had the nasty habit of marrying and murdering a new virgin every day to assure himself of spousal fidelity. Nor was it enough to produce a series of nested stories under such deadlines (truly, I complain too much), stories so prickly and tantalizing that the king postponed her murder every night to wait for the next installment. That's to say nothing of the entirely forgotten three children she bore over those thousand and one nights. Who recalls that there was always a new baby in Scheherazade's arms?

Scheherazade has earned her rest, but she remains booked and busy, obsessively renamed and reclaimed. She is dusted off and wheeled out wherever the "magic of storytelling" is conjured, irresistible to any writer trafficking in "wonder" or "enchantment." Her ghost floats through the work of Dave Eggers, Colum McCann, and Salman Rushdie in strenuous if harmless homage. But she has also been claimed by new constituencies and put to unsavory new uses. The narrator of "The Arabian Nights" must find herself bewildered at being name-checked in Karl Rove's "Scheherazade Strategy," as well as in articles about brand management, serialized content, mastering the attention economy-the unwitting inspiration, and occasional face, of the shifty and shifting tangle of alibis that goes by "storytelling."