“Vinokur inspires confidence in his ability to produce an edition of Babel's stories that will be more faithful to the original, both literally and stylistically, than any other available in English.” —Carol J. Avins, editor of Isaac Babel, 1920 Diary and author of Border Crossings: The West and Russian Identity in Soviet Literature, 1917-1934 
“Isaac Babel wrote amazingly powerful, stinging sentences of almost brutal, always poetic compactness.  It is a gift to have these sentences in this collection of Babel’s stories and short essays, translated by the talented Val Vinokur.  Babel, one of the greatest writers in Russian in the 20th century, was murdered by Stalin's secret police in 1940.  He was 45.  This wonderful book is a reminder of what Soviet brutality destroyed."  —Richard Bernstein, former book critic for the The New York Times and columnist for The International Herald Tribune
"Vinokur's lucid translation brilliantly conveys the vivid precision and the emotional edge of Isaac Babel's prose to the English-language reader." —Anya Ulinich, author of Lena Finkle's Magic Barrel and Petropolis