Hollywood's golden girl is back in Slow Days, Fast Company, Eve Babitz's collection of dispatches from the City of Angels, only as she could experience it. Babitz calls this her favorite of the books she wrote, and after the success of Eve's Hollywood, published by NYRB Classics, Slow Days, Fast Company is poised to become a favorite of Babitz fans new and old, too.
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. NYRB Classics also publishes Eve's Hollywood.
"One of the truly original writers of 20th-century Los
Angeles." —Kevin Dettmar, The Atlantic
“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
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