Eve Babitz

In between the partying, the drugs, the love affairs, the 'squalid overboogie' of it all, Eve Babitz made time to chronicle the world as she saw it in works like Eve's Hollywood; Slow Days, Fast Company and Sex and Rage. But Babitz considered her letters 'the kind of writing I do best,' calling them 'practically a diary,' and rarely depositing them into a mailbox. Her missives to friends like Joseph Heller, Annie Leibovitz, Paul Ruscha and Steve Martin - fresh and frank, dashing and droll - are irresistible, as highly spirited as they are acutely perceptive. In Too L.A., Babitz's biographer, Lili Anolik, has performed a remarkable feat, not only raising these letters from the tomb but accompanying them with informative and irreverent commentary, guiding the reader through the uproarious lifelong party that was Eve Babitz's real masterpiece.

INTOXICATING ~ EFFERVESCENT ~ HEDONISTIC Iconic LA 'lit girl' Eve Babitz's semi-autobiographical novel of sun, excess and success. Jacaranda - wild child of sun and surf - grows up by the hurling glory of the ocean and believes that good things are infinite. Propelled by drink, drugs and men, she travels headlong through the rip current of West Hollywood's decadent paradise in the pursuit of pleasure. Before long, she is on the edge: the allure of excess threatens her book deal, the patience of her agent and the possibility of a new life. Sex and Rage charts the highs and lows of a life lived at the limits, of creative pursuit and of dazzlingly beautiful people in 1970s LA.

Pore over the letters of Eve Babitz--queen of the witty, gossipy, and thoroughly engrossing missive. Joan Didion, Joseph Heller, Annie Leibovitz, Paul Ruscha, Anne Rice, Steve Martin, and many others appear in this first-of-its-kind collection. Letter-writing was the kind of writing Babitz did best. Her missives--fresh and frank, dashing and droll--are irresistible, as highly spirited as they are acutely perceptive. Take, for example, this letter to a friend in 1979: "I wrote this letter to Leo Lerman, that editor at Vogue who took me out to lunch at the Algonquin when I was in NY.... So I told him how I'd moved to Santa Monica, and what it was like, and the skating and the Rodeo Drive-type stores. And he published the thing as is, or was (it was slightly edited). Now it's appearing on every newsstand. And since it's the kind of writing I do best--letters--people are dropping dead all over the place over how wonderful I am." People will drop dead all over the place when they get a load of this collection featuring letters to or from some of Babitz' most famous friends, lovers, artistic idols and rivals, like Joan Didion, Joseph Heller, Annie Leibovitz, Paul Ruscha, Anne Rice, and Steve Martin.

Eve Babitz si bok Late dagar, ville netter kom ut første gongen i 1977. Her møter vi ei kvinne med gnistrande livsappetitt og fortreffeleg observasjonsevne. Gjennom ti kapittel følgjer vi dragnaden hennar mot reiser, rus, californiske solnedgangar og ei mengde ulike folk. Vi treffer forfattarar, druedyrkarar, basketballspelarar og sosietetsfolk, filmstjerner som er fortvila over eigen suksess og italienske femmes fatales meir fatale enn Babitz sjølv.Ingen av Eve Babitz (1943–2021) sine bøker frå 1970- og 1980-talet slo gjennom då dei kom ut. Dei havna i skuggen av imaget hennar som it-jente, og temaa ho skreiv om – Los Angeles, skjønnheit, sex – blei avfeia som overflatiske. På 2010-talet har ho derimot blitt feira for den sanselege og viltre stilen sin. Late dagar, ville netter er ein moderne klassikar i grenselandet mellom fakta og fiksjon – ei feiring av byen Los Angeles og av overskridande liv.

Eve Babitz si bok Late dagar, ville netter kom ut første gongen i 1977. Her møter vi ei kvinne med gnistrande livsappetitt og fortreffeleg observasjonsevne. Gjennom ti kapittel følgjer vi dragnaden hennar mot reiser, rus, californiske solnedgangar og ei mengde ulike folk. Vi treffer forfattarar, druedyrkarar, basketballspelarar og sosietetsfolk, filmstjerner som er fortvila over eigen suksess og italienske femmes fatales meir fatale enn Babitz sjølv.Ingen av Eve Babitz (1943–2021) sine bøker frå 1970- og 1980-talet slo gjennom då dei kom ut. Dei havna i skuggen av imaget hennar som it-jente, og temaa ho skreiv om – Los Angeles, skjønnheit, sex – blei avfeia som overflatiske. På 2010-talet har ho derimot blitt feira for den sanselege og viltre stilen sin. Late dagar, ville netter er ein moderne klassikar i grenselandet mellom fakta og fiksjon – ei feiring av byen Los Angeles og av overskridande liv.

Eve Babitz vækker et sted, en tid og en stemning til live, som få andre. Og ingen skriver bedre om high school-tiden og den dunkle overgang fra uskyld til voksenliv end Babitz. Samvittighedsfuldt og usentimentalt, men forstående over for sit tidligere jeg fortæller hun om det korte tidsrum på nogle få år, hvor flyvefærdige sjæle forsøger at finde en mening med autoriteterne, hierarkierne, uretfærdighederne og med sex. På baggrund af Babitz’ eget bedsteborgerlige, klaustrofobiske miljø er det forbrydertyperne (James Dean er prototypen og hendes helt), som nyder hendes fascination og respekt. ”I enhver ung mands liv er der en Eve Babitz. Det er som oftest Eve Babitz.” Earl McGrath, Rolling Stone Records

Eve Babitz kan med rette beskrives som festudgaven af Joan Didion, af hvem hun altid har stået i skyggen. Fra Los Angeles med Stravinsky som gudfar og som 20-årig berømt foreviget, da hun nøgen spillede skak med Marcel Duchamp. Babitz festede igennem sin ungdom, men stoppede i tide og undgik den skæbne som rigdom, berømmelse og uanede muligheder ofte fører med sig. Temaer, som Babitz efterfølgende har bygget et forfatterskab op omkring.Eve Babitz vækker et sted, en tid og en stemning til live, som få andre. Los Angeles og Sunset Boulevard i begyndelsen af 1970'erne. Babitz svømmede i berømmelse, berømtheder og toppen af populærkulturen i samme periode. Romanen er et yderst velskrevet vidnesbyrd med en nerve og drive, som gør det bemærkelsesværdigt, at den ikke tidligere er udkommet på dansk. Cool ... charmerende ... en vidunderlig, flagrende og skarp bog?????? BerlingskeBabitz’ underholdende værk ... er både tidstypisk og tidløst menneskeklogtWeekendavisenSiderne nærmest vender sig selvLitteratursiden.dkMorsom og observantBogblogger.dk

Previously uncollected nonfiction pieces by Hollywood's ultimate It Girl about everything from fashion to tango to Jim Morrison and Nicholas Cage. Eve Babitz knew everyone, tried everything (at least once), and was never shy about sharing her thoughts on any subject, be it sex, weight loss, drug use, or her ambivalence toward New York City. From the 1970s through the 1990s, Babitz wrote on a wild variety of topics for some of the biggest publications around, from Esquire to Vogue to The New York Times Book Review. I Used to Be Charming brings together the best of this nonfiction work. All previously uncollected, these pieces range from sharp personal essays on body image and the male gaze to playful meditations on everything from ballroom dancing to kissing to perfume. There are breathtaking celebrity profiles, too. In one, Nicholas Cage takes her for a ride in his '67 Sting Ray and in another she dishes about dragging Jim Morrison to bed before the The Doors had even settled on a band name ("Jim was embarrassing because he wasn't cool, but I still loved him," she writes). In another essay, the author ponders her earliest days in the spotlight, posing nude with Marcel Duchamp in that famous Julian Wasser photo, and in another, the title essay, she writes about the tragic accident that compelled her to leave that spotlight behind forever.

Sophie, a twenty-something Jim Morrison groupie gliding through a golden existence in L.A., and Lola, a German immigrant who has settled in Hollywood, know that while Los Angeles is constantly changing, it is essentially eternal. The two women dazzle - one with the promises of youth, the other with the fulfilment of nostalgia - as they wend their way through the pink sunsets and the palm trees of Los Angeles.Living out their addictively decadent lives, Sophie and Lola are cult writer Babitz's literary embodiment of the iconic L.A. Woman - more than in part inspired by her own wild and hedonistic youth.

It is the 1970s in LA, and Jacaranda Leven - child of sun and surf - is swept into the dazzling cultural milieu of the beautiful people. Floating on a cloud of drink, drugs and men, she finds herself adrift, before her talent for writing, and a determined literary agent, set her on a course for New York and a new life.Sex & Rage is a recently re-discovered classic from author Eve Babitz, herself a muse to many an artist, writer and musician in the 1970s. A semi-autobiographical novel, it charts the highs and lows of a life lived at the limits, and transports the reader to a sunnier, dreamier, more reckless time and place.

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 Chateau Marmont, 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.

Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: by the time she'd hit thirty, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles. Immortalized as the nude beauty facing down Duchamp and as one of Ed Ruscha's Five 1965 Girlfriends, Babitz's first book showed her to be a razor-sharp writer with tales of her own. Eve's Hollywood is an album of vivid snapshots of Southern California's haute bohemians, of outrageously beautiful high-school ingenues and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of rock stars sleeping it off at the Chateau Marmont. And though Babitz's prose might appear careening, she's in control as she takes us on a ride through an LA of perpetual delight, from a joint serving the perfect taquito, to the corner of La Brea and Sunset where we make eye contact with a roller-skating hooker, to the Watts Towers. This "daughter of the wasteland" is here to show us that her city is no wasteland at all but a glowing landscape of swaying fruit trees and blooming bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and the Santa Ana winds--and every bit as seductive as she is.

Soon to be a TV show on Hulu Eve Babitz is a writer like no other--she "is to prose what Chet Baker is to jazz" (Vanity Fair)--and she has influenced a generation of writers and readers with her sophisticated, witty, and delightful work. L.A. Woman is quintessential Babitz, the story of Sophie, a twenty-something blonde Jim Morrison groupie gliding through a golden existence in L.A. and Lola, a German immigrant who settles in Hollywood in the twenties to drive Pierce Arrows recklessly down Sunset Boulevard and who knows that Maybelline mascara cakes and Rudolph Valentino are the essence of life. Sophie and Lola, like the many other women who move in and out of this electric saga know that while L.A. is constantly changing it is essentially eternal; through their eyes we see the mixture of high culture and low, the promises of youth and the fulfillment of nostalgia, the pink sunsets and the palm trees that are L.A. And through this fantastic tale, Babitz shares what it is to be a woman in what she convinces us is the capital of civilization.

Two by Two is a fast-paced swirl through the dancing scene in L.A., where Leonardo DiCaprio has been known to swing at The Derby and Sandra Bullock salsas at El Floridita. Eve Babitz, a writer known for her hip, off-the-cuff, idiosyncratic style, spends two years of her life, ruins nine pairs of shoes, and goes through countless dance partners learning to appreciate and master all the hot dances from foxtrot and two-step to lindy, tango, salsa, and swing. Along the way she meets obsessed dancers and listens night after night as they pour out the secrets of their style—who the best teachers are, where to find the perfect dancing shoes, and how to fall in love with your partner. Eve brings the flirtatious energy of dancing alive like no other writer. Two by Two is not a book that teaches you how to dance, but it will surely make you want to learn once you've read it.