The follow-up to our highly acclaimed edition of Red Cavalry, again translated by the award-winning Boris Dralyuk

Odessa was a uniquely Jewish city, and the stories of Isaac Babel – a Jewish man, writing in Russian, born in Odessa – uncover its tough underbelly. Gangsters, prostitutes, beggars, smugglers: no one escapes the pungent, sinewy force of Babel's pen.

From the tales of the magnetic cruelty of Benya Krik – infamous mob boss, and one of the great anti-heroes of Russian literature – to the devastating semi-autobiographical account of a young Jewish boy caught up in a pogrom, this collection of stories is considered one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian literature.

Translated with precision and sensitivity by Boris Dralyuk, whose rendering of the rich Odessan argot is pitch-perfect, Odessa Stories is the first ever stand-alone collection of all the stories Babel set in the city – and includes tales from the original collection as well as later ones.

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.

Books in the “isaac babel” bookshelf created by Влада Сладкова