Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Sulfurblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I have a very special show for you.

What I am about to present is the beautiful edition published by Norton of the complete works of Isaac

Bobble. With me, all by phone, our Bobble's daughter, Natalie Babel, Natalie Babel,

from Washington, the translator of the entire volume, and this is a rarity. What we have for

the first time is the complete work

by a modern writer by one translator. So finally, there is a consistency and a consideration

of the tone, and the introduction to the book is by Cynthia Ozick, one of the writers

that I most admire, essayist, novelist, novellaist, short story writer.

Her books include, most recently Quarrel in Quandry and the Putter Messer Papers,

Bloodshed in Three Novellas, The Cannibal Galaxy, and I thought that I would begin by saying

what it was I encountered when I encountered the work of Isaac Babel.

People had spoken to me for many, many years about Bobble before I read him, and still I was not prepared

because the stories in his most famous book,

the stories in Red Cavalry, can cause your head to explode.

They are a report fictionalized of the incursion of the Cossacks against the Poles as they traveled to bring communism to the

new world.

...