Isaak Babel

Two women--beautiful, successful Raven, still suffering from an ugly childhood, and romance writer Holly, struggling to build a new identity--cross paths as they search for love, happiness, and happy endings in Hollywood.

"The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel is the most authoritative and complete edition of Isaac Babel's fiction ever published in paperback. Best known for his mastery of the short story form, Babel is now considered a peer of Chekhov, Kafka, and Hemingway. His talents are marvelously displayed in this volume, which includes his early stories; the stunning Red Cavalry stories, drawn from his personal experiences with the Cossack cavalry during the 1920 Russian-Polish war; the Odessa stories, featuring a cast of characters from Babel's hometown, including the legendary gangster Benya Krik; and the tragic later stories, which reflect the sorrowful travails of a modern nation that remained a prisoner of its brutal past. To read Babel is to experience the wild and often terrifying swings of Russian history."--BOOK JACKET.

The Russian writer Isaac Babel (1894-1940) is widely acknowledged to be one of the great masters of twentieth-century literature, hailed as a genius by such critics as Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe. The work for which he is best known is a cycle of stories called Red Cavalry, which depicts the exploits of the Cossack cavalry during the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1920 and is based on Babel's experiences as he rode with the Cossacks during the campaign. Throughout this period Babel kept a diary, in which he recorded the devastation of the war, the extreme cruelty of the Polish and Red armies alike toward the Jewish population in Ukraine and eastern Poland, and his own conflicted role as both Soviet revolutionary and Jew. The 1920 Diary, a vital source for Red Cavalry as well as a compelling narrative, is now published in English for the first time. . 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.

Rip Van Winkle / Washington Irving [Young Goodman Brown]( / Nathaniel Hawthorne [Fall of the House of Usher]( / Edgar Allan Poe The lightning-rod man / Herman Melville The diamond lens / Fitzjames O'Brien The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County / Mark Twain The outcasts of Poker Flat / Bret Harte [Damned Thing]( / Ambrose Bierce The turn of the screw / Henry James The Hiltons' holiday / Sarah Orne Jewett The gift of the Magi / O. Henry The moving finger / Edith Wharton The open boat / Stephen Crane Lou, the prophet / Willa Cather The men of Forty Mile / Jack London Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald [A rose for Emily]( William Faulkner Big two-hearted river / Ernest Hemingway Flight / John Steinbeck

"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, peasants, and shtetl-dwellers; and among them the bespectacled, Jewish writer/intellectual, observing it all and trying to figure out 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; additional Red Cavalry stories; 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."--BOOK JACKET.