The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel

Name: The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel
ISBN: 9780393324020

Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel (Editor), and Peter Constantine (Translator)

Following the historic publication of Norton's The Complete Works of Isaac Babel in the fall of 2001, The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel appears as the most authoritative and complete edition of his fiction ever published in paperback. Babel was best known for his mastery of the short story form in which he ranks alongside Kafka and Hemingway but his career was tragically cut short when he was murdered by Stalin's secret police. Edited by his daughter Nathalie Babel 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." This will be the standard edition of Babel's stories for years to come.

“[The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel] opened a door in my mind, and behind that door I found the room where I wanted to spend the rest of my life.” —Paul Auster

“A celebration of literary genius framed by twentieth-century tragedy...[Babel's stories] have an electrifying cumulative impact...He is a writer who stabs the mind and the heart and the inner eye with short, savage strokes.” —Richard Bernstein, New York Times

“A monumental book.” —Jonathan Rosen, New York Times Book Review

“A triumph...Peter Constantine's translation is extraordinary.” —James Wood, The New Republic

About the Authors

Isaac Babel was born in Odessa in 1894, the son of a Jewish tradesman. At the age of twenty-one he went to St Petersburg, where he had to avoid the Tsarist police because he lacked the residence certificate required of all Jews. Gorky was the first to encourage Babel by printing two of his stories in his magazine. During the First World War, Babel fought with the Tsarist army and in 1917 went over to the Bolsheviks. In 1923 he returned to literature with a number of short stories printed in periodicals. An instant literary success, these formed the nucleus of the Odessa Stories, a group of vivid sketches of Russian Jewish life, and the unforgettable Red Cavalry (1926), written out of his experiences with Budyonny’s cavalry in the Polish campaign of 1920. Other stories, scenarios and plays followed. Unable to conform to the demands for political conformism that were being made on him, however, Babel was arrested suddenly in 1939. He died, possibly in 1941.

Nathalie Babel, his daughter, edited two other books of Babel's writing and is the author of Hugo and Dostoevsky.

Peter Constantine is the director of the Program in Literary Translation at the University of Connecticut, the publisher of World Poetry Books, and editor-in-chief of the magazine New Poetry in Translation. A prolific translator from several modern and classical languages, Constantine was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann, the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his translation of The Bird Is a Raven by Benjamin Lebert, and the Koret Jewish Book Award and a National Jewish Book Award citation for The Complete Works of Isaac Babel.