Dwight F. Reynolds is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Arab Folklore: A Handbook and editor and coauthor of Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition and The Cambridge Companion to Modern Arab Culture.

The richness of Reynolds's text and his scholarly accomplishment serve as poignant reminders of how little we know about Arab folk performances and how difficult it is to teach these great traditions to our students.- Virginia Danielson (Middle East Studies Association Bulletin) Reynolds's book both complements the works of his predecessors and surpasses them in the area on which he focuses. With it, we have a full and methodologically sophisticated treatment of the social poetics of Sirat Bani Hilal performance that is a model of how such research should be conducted.- Peter Heath (International Journal of Middle East Studies)