Deborah Eisenberg

Babel is known for the gleaming polish and explosive compression of his work. He was, among other things, a war correspondent, and these stories are confected from his experiences of following the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1920. They treat, in part, paradoxical relationships between idealism and brutality, between triumph and shame, and in a page and a half he can emblazon on your brain a revelation that no other writer could represent in a thousand pages.