Eve Babitz is the author of several books of fiction, including Sex and Rage- Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time, L.A. Woman, and Black Swans- Stories. Her nonfiction works include Fiorucci, the Book and Two by Two- Tango, Two-Step, and the L.A. Night. She has written for publications including Ms. and Esquire and in the late 1960s designed album covers for the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Linda Ronstadt. Her novel Eve's Hollywood is published by NYRB Classics. Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, as well as a nonfiction book of film criticism. He is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Her writing took multiple forms. . . . But in the center was always Babitz and her sensibility fun and hot and smart, a Henry James loving party girl. Naomi Fry, New Republic Babitz takes to the page lightly, slipping sharp observations into roving, conversational essays and perfecting a kind of glamorous shrug. Kaitlin Phillips, Bookforum [Babitz] achieved that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, is purely enjoyable enough to be mistaken for simple entertainment. It s a tradition that includes Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire, Preston Sturges, Ed Ruscha, and, it goes without saying, Marilyn Monroe. Lili Anolik, Vanity Fair Babitz' collection of essays, Slow Days, Fast Company, the best non-fiction written about the Joys of Sensuous LA, I have always thought right up there with Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Lee Grove, Boston Globe [The] radiantly specific Slow Days, Fast Company. ..might serve to explicate LA better than any other book I ve ever read... Like her generational and aesthetic peer Renata Adler, Babitz has a nervous, windblown eye, a knack for perceptual and associative leaps. Like her West Coast fellow Joan Didion, she has a stringent in fact, rather stark intelligence...Babitz s perceptions, her aphoristic formulations, are legion and strike me as both startling and profound. Matthew Specktor, Tin House blog Her dishy, evocative style has never been characterized as Joan Didion-deep but it's inarguably more fun and inviting, providing equally sharp insights on the mood and meaning of Southern California. Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune Undeniably the work of a native, in love with her place. This quality of the intrinsic and the indigenous is precisely what has been mising from almost all the fiction about Hollywood...the accuracy and feeling with which she delineates LA is a fresh quality in California writing. Larry McMurtry, Washington Post In these ten cajoling tales, Los Angeles is the patient, the heroine, hero, victim, and aggressor: the tales a marvel of free-form madness. Like Renata Adler, Eve Babitz has fact, never telling too much Vogue Babitz loves LA. These ten pieces are a love story about her city...slick and clever as ever, and keenly perceptive as ever. Michele M. Leber, Library Journal