Isaac Babel

A new selection of Isaac Babel's 26 most vital and beautiful stories, in acclaimed translations by Boris Dralyuk Isaac Babel honed one of the most distinctive styles in all Russian literature. Brashly conversational one moment, dreamily lyrical the next, his stories exult in the richness of everyday speech and sensual pleasure only to be shaken by brutal jolts of violence. These stories take us from the underworld of Babel's native Odessa, city of gangsters and lowlives, of drunken brawls and bleeding sunsets, to the terror and absurdity of life as a soldier in the Polish-Soviet War. Selected and translated by the prize-winning Boris Dralyuk, this collection captures the irreverence, passion and coarse beauty of Babel's singular voice.

Essential Stories

Of Sunshine and Bedbugs

Конармия. Одесские Рассказы.

Peter Constantine

Nathalie Babel

The collected short stories of a master of the form are accompanied by an assortment of letters, plays, diaries, and screenplays in a remarkable, authorized anthology. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

The Complete Works of Isaac Babel

Red Cavalry and Other Stories

A new mass-market edition of the acclaimed stories of violence, crime and sex ’One of those “where have you been all my life?” books’ Nick Lezard, Guardian In the city of Odessa, the lawless streets hide darker stories of their own. From the magnetic cruelty of mob boss Benya Krik to the devastating account of a young Jewish boy caught up in a pogrom, Odessa Stories uncovers the tales of gangsters, prostitutes, beggars and smugglers: no one can escape the pungent, sinewy force of Isaac Babel’s pen. Translated with precision and sensitivity by Boris Dralyuk, whose rendering of the rich Odessan slang is pitch-perfect, this acclaimed new translation of Odessa Stories contains the grittiest of Babel’s tales, considered by many to be some of the greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian literature. Isaac Babel was a short-story writer, playwright, literary translator and journalist. He joined the Red Army as a correspondent during the Russian civil war. The first major Russian-Jewish writer to write in Russian, he was hugely popular during his lifetime. He was murdered in Stalin's purges in 1940, at the age of 45.

Odessa Stories

Bir Öpücük

'Everyone makes mistakes, even God.' In the original Odessa Stories collection published in 1931, Babel describes the life of the fictional Jewish mob boss Benya Krik - one of the great anti-heroes of Russian literature - and his gang in the ghetto of Moldavanka, around the time of the October Revolution. Praised by Maxim Gorky and considered one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian literature, this is the first ever stand-alone collection of all Babel's narratives set in the city, and includes the original stories as well as later tales.

Boris Dralyuk

David McDuff

Collected Stories (Penguin Classics)

Babel

Oorlogsdagboek van de Russische schrijver (1894-1940) over de veldtocht tegen Polen in 1920.

1920 Diary

Dashiell Hammett

Brian Stanley

Michael Bracken

William Burton McCormick

Frederick C. Davis

Jane Jakeman

Carroll John Daly

Frederick Nebel

Brian Townsley

Hannah Honeybun

Katrina Younes

Frank Megna

Jonathan Sheppard

Jim Doherty

D.L. Champion

T.T. Flynn

Arthur Rodman Bowker

Norman Saunders

Black Mask, the greatest American detective magazine of all time, is back with another issue. This time around, it includes nine new stories in the Black Mask vein by Brian Townsley, Jane Jakeman, Brian Stanley, Hannah Honeybun, William Burton McCormick, Frank Megna, Jonathan Sheppard, Michael Bracken, Jim Doherty, as well as a new article on Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister by Katrina Younes. In addition, Boris Dralyuk has kindly supplied his translation of Isaac Babel’s “Lyubka the Cossack” and arranged for its reprinting here. And, as with previous issues, Black Mask collects some of the best hard-boiled detective fiction from the Popular Publications vaults, as written by some of the genre’s best: Dashiell Hammett, D.L. Champion, Carroll John Daly, Frederick Nebel, T.T. Flynn, and Frederick C. Davis.

Black Mask 2019 Yearbook

Lyubka the Cossack

Edited by his daughter Nathalie and translated by award winner Peter Constantine, this paperback edition includes the stunning "Red Cavalry Stories"; "The Odessa Tales, " featuring the legendary gangster Benya Krik; and the tragic later stories, including "Guy de Maupassant."

The Collected Stories

War's mess and muddle, the brutality and the inanity of fighting - few have better captured this than Isaac Babel, who was a journalist with the Soviet First Cavalry Army. His unflinching portrayal of the murderous havoc of battle is offset by an unexpected and wry humour: having seen the fighting up close, Babel is able to find the funny side of war while depicting its bloody side - in all its mesmerising and casual violence. The lyricism and bitterness that characterise the thirty-five short stories of Red Cavalry are stunningly reproduced in this new translation by the award-winning Boris Dralyuk.

Red Cavalry

(Kashirina), M. N. Berkov, Iosif Stalin, Vyacheslav Polonsky, Clara Malraux, Kornei Chukovsky, Erwin Sinko, Antonina Pirozhkova, Dmitry Furmanov, and others. Many of these materials appear in English for the first time." ""Criticism" brings together five major assessments of Babel's legacy, by Viktor Shklovsky, Semyon Budyonny, Lionel Trilling, Efraim Sicher, and Gregory Freidin." "A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography complete this Norton Critical Edition." --Book Jacket.

Isaac Babel's Selected Writings (Norton Critical Editions)

H. T. Willetts

Carol J. Avins

The 1920 Diary is the most significant contemporary account of the tragedy of Eastern European Jewry during this period. The Diary also yields important insights into Babel's personal evolution, showing his youthful curiosity and his anguish as, frequently concealing his own Jewish identity, he mingled with the victimized Jews of the region's shtetls and with his Cossack comrades. Finally, the Diary sheds light on Babel's artistic development, revealing the path from observations recorded in excitement and despair to the painstakingly crafted narratives of the Red Cavalry cycle.

"Amazing not only as literature but as biography." —Richard Bernstein, The New York Times One of the great masterpieces of Russian literature, the Red Cavalry cycle retains today the shocking freshness that made Babel's reputation when the stories were first published in the 1920s. Using his own experiences as a journalist and propagandist with the Red Army during the war against Poland, Babel brings to life an astonishing cast of characters from the exuberant, violent era of early Soviet history: commissars and colonels, Cossacks and peasants, and among them the bespectacled, Jewish writer/intellectual, observing it all and trying to establish his role in the new Russia. Drawn from the acclaimed, award-winning Complete Works of Isaac Babel, this volume includes all of the Red Cavalry cycle; Babel's 1920 diary, from which the material for the fiction was drawn; and his preliminary sketches for the stories—the whole constituting a fascinating picture of a great writer turning life into art.

Throughout his life Isaac Babel was torn by opposing forces, by the desire both to remain faithful to his Jewish roots and yet to be free of them. This duality of vision infuses his work with a powerful energy from the earliest tales including 'Old Shloyme' and 'Childhood', which affirm his Russian-Jewish childhood, to the relatively non-Jewish world of his collection of stories entitled 'Red Cavalry'. Babel's masterpiece, 'Red Cavalry' is the most dramatic expression of his dualism and in his simultaneous acceptance and rejection of his heritage heralds the great American-Jewish writers from Henry Roth to Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.

Isaac Babel

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