The Complete Works of Isaac Babel

Considered one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, Isaac Babel (1894–1941) left a literary legacy that continues to grow more than sixty years after his death at the hands of Stalin’s secret police. This magnificent book, edited by his daughter Natalie and newly translated by Peter Constantine, is a literary event of enormous dimensions – the first English, single-volume edition of Isaac Babel’s work, it brings this magnificent writer back to life.

To read Babel is to relive the wild and often terrifying swings of twentieth-century Russian history. No writer has conveyed the story of this nation and its brutal heritage with such emotion and energy. He injected compassion, wit and daring into the literary climate of post-Tsarist Russia. In the process he created a style so vivid, so lacerating and so utterly hypnotic that his stories have come to define the bloody landscape of the Soviet Union in the years between the two world wars.

The collection includes such classic works as the Red Cavalry Stories , the Odessa Stories and the 1920 Diary, as well as several previously untranslated stories and screenplays. The Complete Works of Isaac Babel will stand as Babel’s final, most enduring legacy.

`Unblinking witness and electric, heroically wrought prose . . . Babel’s art flourished in Lenin’s false dawn. As darkness fell, he became his talent’s warder; his vitality became his enemy’ John Updike

`Babel is altogether the artist, drawing the reader completely into a new view of the world’ New York Review of Books

`Some of the finest Russian fiction of the twentieth century . . . A true literary event’ Washington Post

`A monumental collection, edited by the Russian author’s daughter, that gathers all of Babel’s deft and brutal writing, including a wide array of previously unavailable material’ Los Angeles Times