The Essential Fictions offers contemporary readers seventy-three short stories by one of twentieth-century Russia's premier storytellers, Isaac Babel. This unique volume, which includes Babel's famous Red Calvary series and his Odessa Stories, was translated, edited, introduced, and annotated by Val Vinokur, a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow in Translation, and features illustrations by Yefim Ladyzhensky, a painter known for his depictions of everyday life under Soviet rule in Babel's native Odessa.

Babel was born in 1894 into multicultural Odessa's thriving Jewish community....