Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Slow Days Fast Company The World the Flesh and L.A. by Eve Babitz Eve Babitz . Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, And L.A. E ve Babitz ist einfach die Coolste. Ein Partygirl, das mit , und Harrison Ford Affären hatte, keinen Drink und keine bewusstseinserweiternde Substanz ausließ. Dennoch saß sie auch nach den ausgelassensten Nächten am Schreibtisch, wo sie ihre Eindrücke von Hollywoods High Society stilvoll und klug zu Papier brachte, diese überarbeitete und nochmal überarbeitete. Das Ergebnis: leichtfüßige Prosa, unangestrengt wie ein sexy Schulterzucken; Sätze wie sie nur Meistern und Meisterinnen der Schreibkunst gelingen. Ihre Pointen und Punchlines zünden rasch hintereinander, das Timing ist das eines Fred Astaire. Harte Arbeit also. Zu den bekanntesten Büchern dieser bemerkenswerten Schriftstellerin, von denen bislang kein einziges auf Deutsch übersetzt wurde (es gibt nicht einmal einen deutschsprachigen Wikipedia-Eintrag zu Eve Babitz) zählen Eve’s Hollywood , Sex and Rage , L.A. Woman und I Used To Be Charming, welches nach ihrem schrecklichen Missgeschick 1997 entstand, bei dem sie ihr Gauze-Kleid in Brand setzte und an den Verbrennungen beinahe gestorben wäre. Zahlreiche ihrer Artikel und Essays erschienen in Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, Vogue, Cosmopolitan und Esquire. Dem äußerst hochwertig selektierenden Buchverlag der New York Review of Books verdanken wir eine 2016 neu aufgelegte Ausgabe ihrer schmalen Story-Sammlung von 1977, Slow Days, Fast Company – dem, wie ich finde, besten ihrer Bücher. Das Adjektiv „dicht“ wäre hier fehl am Platz, angesichts der klaren, geistesgegenwärtigen Erzählweise. Ihre Beschreibungen von Busenfreundinnen, Liebhabern, Landschaften und Lichtstimmungen sind eindringlich und kurzweilig. Die Hauptrolle ihrer Bücher war zumeist jene Stadt, als deren Poetin Babitz heute gilt: Los Angeles. Vielseitig, weithin ausgebreitet, zeitweilig vom Smogdeckel abgedichtet, dann wieder sonnenklar und schmerzhaft hell – zu sonnig und hell für ein Partygirl mit Köpfchen. ©Tolentino/The New Yorker. Da wir, liebe Leserin, die des Englischen mächtig und von der weiten Welt fasziniert ist, nun unter uns sind – denn alle anderen sind mittlerweile seit der dritten Zeile aus der Lektüre ausgestiegen oder überlegen gar, ob sie nicht die Sittenwacht ob dieses verruchten Literaturblogs einschalten sollten – lass uns weiterfliegen in die gleißende Nacht über der sündhaften Stadt der Engel. Über den Wind, der von den Santa-Ana-Bergen hinter L.A. herabweht und die Sinne der Angelinos verwirrt, lesen wir: It was one of those nights when the Santa Anas were blowing so hard that searchlights were the only thing in the sky that were straight. Regen, selten in L.A. und häufig in San Francisco, welches nicht nur für Babitz ein klimatischer und kultureller Gegenpol zu Südkalifornien ist, übt einen besonderen, europäischen Zauber auf sie aus: The rain is freedom; it has always been like that in L.A. It’s freedom from smog and unbroken hateful sameness, it’s freedom to look out the window and think of London and little violets and Paris and cobblestones. It’s freedom to be cozy. Cozy! You can be cozy and not even have to go to San Francisco. Über das, was Frauen wollen, schreibt Eve Babitz: Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the backs of their necks from otherwise austere hairdos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt. Der hohe Stellenwert, den die Autorin dem Sex einräumt, erreicht durch ihren Liebhaber Shawn nie gekannte Höhepunkte: The funny thing was that I’d always believed that sex masterpieces were the best kind. Better than Bach, the Empire State Building, or Marcel Proust. Stets präsent ist die Furcht der Autorin, fett zu werden. Dieses Thema artet jedoch nie in quälerische Selbstgeißelung aus, sondern zieht sich als Running Gag durch den Erzählband: I remember when I first started having lovers, they never failed to remind me that if I didn’t watch out, I’d get really fat (implying that I was painful enough to behold as it was). Then the Beatles came with their Jane Ashers and those Mary Quant clothes that you could only wear if you were ten years old and raised on English cabbage. And (with Shawn), for the first time in my life, I began to deep-down know that even though I was not as thin as George Harrison, it was going to be all right. Über ihre verehrte Freundin Mary Sanford schreibt sie: (Her hair) defied gravity and seemed to accompany her like a funny angora animal. She was dressed in flowing, translucent lilac cotton with peach slippers; everything floated when she moved. She smelled like lilacs. She had lilac mascara around her eyes and lilac eye shadow that faded into her temples. Her lips were peach. Altogether she looked like a sunrise in paradise. Später begegnet sie der ungeschminkten Mary am Strand: And there was Mary, lying on the sand like an ordinary person only better, because without her make-up she almost looked ordinary and it was secret, like having the Mona Lisa in the trunk of your car without the frame. In Anbetracht von Marys Losgelöstheit von allen irdischen Dingen, verheimlicht ihr Eve sogar einen Reifenplatzer direkt vor deren Auffahrt, um sie nicht mit derart mondänen Problemen zu verstimmen: If you’re going to have a problem around Mary, it seemed to me that stolen jewels were the right level. Und über die Tatsache, schon früh in der High School begehrenswert gewesen zu sein: Women I know are always saying that they’re glad, after all, that they weren’t popular in high school because all the girls who were are now taking Valium and are divorced and stupid. But everyone knows that it would have been much better to have been popular in high school when your blood was clean, and pure lust and kisses lasted forever. Chocolate Cokes in high school are better than caviar on a yacht when you’re forty-five. It’s common knowledge. Common knowledge ist auch, dass Babitz im gleichnamigen The-Doors-Song als L.A. Woman verewigt wurde. Sie war auch tatsächlich eine Tochter der Stadt, 1943 in Hollywood geboren und daher früh mit Künstlern und deren Spleens vertraut. Ihr Taufpate war der russische Komponist ( Le sacre du printemps ). Als Kind picknickte sie mit ihrer Familie oft am L.A. River in Gesellschaft von Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Arnold Schönberg, Bertrand Russell oder dem Ehepaar Huxley. Mit zwanzig spielte sie nackt mit (dem bekleideten) Marcel Duchamp Schach und ließ sich dabei in einer berühmten Fotografie verewigen, bevor sie der französische Konzeptkünstler und Schachexperte in acht Zügen matt setzte. In den 1960ern arbeitete sie als Grafikerin für Ahmet Erteguns Atlantic Records und designte Albumcovers für die Byrds, oder . Ihrem literarischen Helden ( Catch-22 ) schrieb die junge Eve einen kurzen und bündigen Brief mit folgendem Inhalt: Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked eighteen-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer. — Eve Babitz. Wer die Welt(en) von Los Angeles erkunden möchte, kann sich in vielen Büchern ein Bild von diesem Moloch am Pazifik machen: Bei John Fante, Charles Bukowski, James Ellroy, Joan Didion, Carrie Fisher, Mike Davis und Raymond Chandler. Eve Babitz gehört auf jeden Fall in den Literatur-Kanon von „La La Land“. Clifford Lee Sargent über diese Bardin ihrer Heimatstadt in seiner Besprechung in Better Than Food: „Die Heilige Theresa des politisch Inkorrekten in Extase.“ Glamour, Sex und Sonnenuntergänge, den Wind im Haar und die Unschuld im Herzen: Eve Babitz ist Hemingway mit Humor, eine supersmarte Seelenfreundin und nicht bloß die leichtlebige Liebhaberin, als die sie bekannt wurde. ISBN 13: 9780394409849. Slow days, fast company: The world, the flesh, and L.A. : tales. Babitz, Eve. This specific ISBN edition is currently not available. Eve Babitz captured the voluptuous quality of L.A. in the1960s in a wildly original, totally unique voice. These stories are time capsule gems, as poignant and startling today as they were when published in the early 1970s. Eve Babitz is not well known today, but she should be. Her first hand experiences in the L.A. cultural scene, translated into haunting fiction, are an unforgettable glimpse at a lost world and a magical time. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. 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 , 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 . “Los Angeles-born glamour girl, bohemian, artist, muse, sensualist, wit and pioneering foodie Eve Babitz. reads like Nora Ephron by way of Joan Didion, albeit with more lust and drugs and tequila. Reading Babitz is like being out on the warm open road at sundown, with what she called, in another book, '4/60 air conditioning' — that is, going 60 miles per hour with all four windows down. You can feel the wind in your hair.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times. “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 “What we now call a ‘fictive memoir’ comes in the form of ten extended anecdotes about Los Angeles, delivered with all the gossipy sprezzatura of the most desirable dinner guest. Food, drink, drugs, sex, sunsets and a surfeit of move stars soak these tales with colour, while the most colourful component of all is our narrator herself.” —Hermione Hoby, TLS. “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. “Imagine the incisive wit of Virginia Woolf mingling with the listlessness of Françoise Sagan—this is the work of Eve Babitz, an ingenue and poet. Her lyrical sensuality is both sexy and cerebral. this book sizzles with hedonistic abandon, sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. it is the clarity of her language and her painterly style that cement her place in the pantheon of American literature.” —Sarah Nasar, bookseller at Atlantis Books (Santorini), British Airways High Life Magazine. “Eve Babitz was Los Angeles' greatest bard. Promiscuous but discerning, the bombshell with a brain bonded with Joan Didion and bedded Jim Morrison. Babitz is finally getting the literary comeback she deserves.” —Lili Loofbourow, The Week "[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 “Babitz’s sentences—fluffy, golden, and spunky—which appear flippant. but like Marilyn Monroe infusing the ditz with closeted intellectualism, Babitz has a genius for revealing the depths of ostensibly shallow waters.” —Monica McClure, The Culture Trip. “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. Eve Babitz, a Glamour Girl Who Refused to Be Dull. EVE’S HOLLYWOOD By Eve Babitz 296 pages. New York Review Books. $17.95. I have a well-read friend, a former used-book dealer in New Orleans, who is of the opinion that the person with the best literary taste in America is Edwin Frank, the editor of New York Review Books Classics. I’m in no position to argue. Since 1999, Frank’s imprint has reissued hundreds of out-of-print books, many of them foreign-language volumes in their first American translations. There’s been nary a misfire in the bunch. Several of these handpicked books, including John Williams’s novel “Stoner,” originally published in 1965, have become not just critical but commercial successes. The books are beautifully designed, as distinctive in their way as are Penguin Classics. Merely holding one to your forehead raises your I.Q. by a standard deviation. I have Frank to thank for introducing me, through his series, to a writer who’s given a steep amount of pleasure over the past year. That writer is the Los Angeles-born glamour girl, bohemian, artist, muse, sensualist, wit and pioneering foodie Eve Babitz, whose prose reads like Nora Ephron’s by way of Joan Didion, albeit with more lust and drugs and tequila. Over the past two years, New York Review Books Classics has reissued two of Babitz’s nonfiction books — “Eve’s Hollywood,” a memoir of sorts that was first published in 1974, and the essay collection “Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.,” which originally appeared in 1977. These books are companion pieces, and they deserve to be read in tandem. But I’m here to talk about “Eve’s Hollywood,” and thus to right a historical wrong: This potent cocktail of a book was never reviewed for this publication. Babitz was born in 1943. Her father was a gifted studio musician for 20th Century Fox; her mother was an artist; her godfather was Igor Stravinsky. The family’s house was a literary and artistic salon. In 1963, Babitz was photographed nude while playing chess with Marcel Duchamp. In her intelligent new introduction to “Eve’s Hollywood,” Holly Brubach puts Babitz’s work in context and reminds us that she designed album covers for Buffalo Springfield and Linda Ronstadt, and that her lovers included Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, and Harrison Ford. She led a big life. Babitz could have simply name-dropped her way through this book, but she’s not that lazy — she’s too busy being interested in everything. I knew I was going to like “Eve’s Hollywood” the moment I scanned its dedication, which Babitz places up front. She thanks not only friends ranging from Orson Welles to Annie Leibovitz but also her gynecologist, deviled marrow bones, “Desbutol, Ritilin, Obertol and any other speed,” and “the way the whipped cream comes in a silver gravy dish in the Polo Lounge when you order Irish coffee.” Babitz is aware, throughout “Eve’s Hollywood,” of the effect she has on people, especially men. “I looked like Brigitte Bardot and I was Stravinsky’s goddaughter,” she writes. Actors spun their cars around to follow her. She decides the thing to do with her life is not to be dull. “Mother,” she says one evening, when she’s a teenager. “Yes, darling,” her mother replies. Babitz says, “I think I’m going to be an adventuress. Is that all right?” She does become an adventuress; she pursues ravishment. There’s a good deal of sex in “Eve’s Hollywood.” There are scenes of running into the ocean with vodka martinis in hand. Babitz is a keen appraiser of beauty, and not just her own. “In the Depression,” she writes, “people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West.” About a certain kind of California teenager, she says: “When they reach the age of 15 and their beauty arrives, it’s very exciting — like coming into an inheritance and, as with inheritances, it’s fun to be around when they first come into the money and watch how they spend it and on what.” Despite the comment about New York’s brains and the West’s faces, Babitz is an ardent defender of Los Angeles. She delivers a takedown of the sort of person who thinks that Nathanael West is the great Hollywood writer because all he sees is a “shallow, corrupt and ugly” place. She reads M.F.K. Fisher, whom she describes as “just like Proust only better because she at least gave the recipes.” She recommends reading Colette for the life-lessons: “you open up anywhere and brush up on what to do.” Babitz flips on the radio and is entranced by what she hears. “If you live in L.A., to reckon time is a trick since there are no winters,” she observes. “There are just earthquakes, parties and certain people. And songs.” She describes the Mamas and the Papas and the Byrds as sounding “as though they came out of a Frostie Freeze machine pipe organ.” Throughout this book, sentences fall like planks of sunlight. Babitz has yet to find her due as an important, early American food writer. There is a chapter on taquitos here that deserves to be widely anthologized. Babitz likens these crispy little things to smack. She watches the man at the counter prepare them, and, she writes, “Watching turns what has been only a stir in your frontal cortex into complete physical wanton craving. Like listening in whorehouses is supposed to do.” She loses her virginity while drinking Rainier Ale. Soon she “began to wonder what else there was out there that was like Rainier Ale.” She’s just as good on dowdier meals. “Jewish food was something you only get to know when, after hating it your entire childhood and thinking everything from the horseradish on the gefilte fish to the no desserts were without sympathy to the human condition, you find yourself alone and cold in a strange place and suddenly discover that you have to have kasha or you’ll shrivel up and die.” Babitz is 73. She stopped writing after suffering severe burns in a freak accident in 1997. The good news is that more reissues of her work are planned, including the republication this summer of her 1979 novel “Sex and Rage.” Reading Eve Babitz is like being out on the warm open road at sundown, with what she called, in another book, “4/60 air conditioning” — that is, going 60 miles per hour with all four windows down. You can feel the wind in your hair. ISBN 13: 9781681370088. Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. (New York Review Books Classics) Babitz, Eve. This specific ISBN edition is currently not available. No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated “its own kind of moral laws,” spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and ’70s. One man proved elusive, however, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. Slow Days, Fast Company is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California that far exceeds its mash-note premise. In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind–swept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movie stars distraught over their success, socialites on three-day drug binges holed up in the , soap-opera actors worried that tomorrow’s script will kill them off, Italian femmes fatales even more fatal than Babitz. And she even leaves LA now and then, spending an afternoon at the house of flawless Orange County suburbanites, a day among the grape pickers of the Central Valley, a weekend in Palm Springs where her dreams of romance fizzle and her only solace is Virginia Woolf. In the end it doesn’t matter if Babitz ever gets the guy— she seduces us. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. 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 . “Los Angeles-born glamour girl, bohemian, artist, muse, sensualist, wit and pioneering foodie Eve Babitz. reads like Nora Ephron by way of Joan Didion, albeit with more lust and drugs and tequila. Reading Babitz is like being out on the warm open road at sundown, with what she called, in another book, '4/60 air conditioning' — that is, going 60 miles per hour with all four windows down. You can feel the wind in your hair.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times. “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 “What we now call a ‘fictive memoir’ comes in the form of ten extended anecdotes about Los Angeles, delivered with all the gossipy sprezzatura of the most desirable dinner guest. Food, drink, drugs, sex, sunsets and a surfeit of move stars soak these tales with colour, while the most colourful component of all is our narrator herself.” —Hermione Hoby, TLS. “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. “Imagine the incisive wit of Virginia Woolf mingling with the listlessness of Françoise Sagan—this is the work of Eve Babitz, an ingenue and poet. Her lyrical sensuality is both sexy and cerebral. this book sizzles with hedonistic abandon, sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. it is the clarity of her language and her painterly style that cement her place in the pantheon of American literature.” —Sarah Nasar, bookseller at Atlantis Books (Santorini), British Airways High Life Magazine. “Eve Babitz was Los Angeles' greatest bard. Promiscuous but discerning, the bombshell with a brain bonded with Joan Didion and bedded Jim Morrison. Babitz is finally getting the literary comeback she deserves.” —Lili Loofbourow, The Week "[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 “Babitz’s sentences—fluffy, golden, and spunky—which appear flippant. but like Marilyn Monroe infusing the ditz with closeted intellectualism, Babitz has a genius for revealing the depths of ostensibly shallow waters.” —Monica McClure, The Culture Trip. “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. Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. There was a time when no one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated “its own kind of moral laws,” spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and ’70s. But there was one man who proved elusive, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a . There was a time when no one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated “its own kind of moral laws,” spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and ’70s. But there was one man who proved elusive, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. She also pulled off a remarkable sleight of hand: Slow Days, Fast Company far exceeds its mash-note premise. It is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California. In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind–swept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movie stars distraught over their success; socialites on three-day drug binges, evading their East Coast banking husbands; soap-opera actors worried that tomorrow’s script will kill them off; Italian femme fatales even more fatal than she is. And she even leaves L.A. sometimes, spending an afternoon at the house of flawless Orange County suburbanites, a day among the grape pickers of the Central Valley, a weekend in Palm Springs where her dreams of romance fizzle and her only solace is Virginia Woolf. In the end it doesn’t matter if Babitz ever gets the guy—she seduces us. “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. "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. 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 many publications, including Ms. and Esquire, and in the late 1960s designed album covers for the. 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 many publications, including Ms. and Esquire, and in the late 1960s designed album covers for the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Linda Ronstadt. NYRB Classics also publishes Eve’s Hollywood. 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.