An autobiographical novel by Eve Babitz, iconic Los Angeles "It Girl" of the 60s and 70s, muse and lover of artists and rock-and-roll stars and, above all else, an unsparing and exuberant observer of an alluring cultural moment in The City of Angels. This confessional L.A. novel is a must-read for anyone who wants to know about 1960s counter culture in Southern California.
Eve Babitz is the author of several books of fiction including Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A.: Tales; 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 is also known for her work designing album covers in the late 1960s, most notably for the cover of Buffalo Springfield Again. Babitz lives in Los Angeles.
"One of the truly original writers of 20th-century Los
Angeles." —Kevin Dettmar, The Atlantic
"The writing—its innocence, its sophistication, its candor, its
wit, its profligacy and pluck, its willingness to fly in the face
of received wisdom, its sheer headlong, impish glee—made me
positively dizzy with pleasure."—Lili Anolik, Vanity Fair
“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
“Eve’s Hollywood has become a classic of LA life. The names in the
dedication, Jim Morrison, David Geffen, Andy Warhol, Stephen
Stills, and more, indicate the era and depth of this important
book.”
—Steve Martin
"Sharp and funny throughout, Babitz offers an almost cinematic
portrait of Los Angeles: gritty, glamorous, toxic and
intoxicating.” —Carmela Ciuraru, The New York Times
“It's so good that I don't want to finish it.” —Laia Garcia,
LennyLetter
“Eve’s Hollywood is less a straightforward story or tell-all than a
sure-footed collection of elliptical yet incisive vignettes and
essays about love, longing, beauty, sex, friendship, art, artifice,
and above all, Los Angeles. . . . Reading West (and Fante and
Chandler and Cain and the like) made me want to go to Los Angeles.
Babitz makes me feel like I’m there.” —Deborah Shapiro, The Second
Pass
“Eve Babitz is to prose what Chet Baker, with his light, airy
style, lyrical but also rhythmic, detached but also sensuous, is to
jazz.” —Lili Anolik, Vanity Fair
“A beautiful stylist whose flourishes were almost always carefully
doled out, calibrated, and sure… The joy of Babitz’s writing is in
her ability to suggest that an experience is very nearly out of
language while still articulating its force within it.” —Naomi Fry,
New Republic
“Babitz skips around time with ease and writes with the airy,
knowing offhandedness of Renata Adler’s Jen Fain, except she
eschews Manhattan sophistication in favor of a Hollywood
unpretentiousness.”—Alison Herman, Flavorwire
“Her chronicle is laced with acerbic wit and sparkling charm . . .
Babitz is a keen observer of her social milieu and the effects of
beauty on power, and comes across as both a savvy cosmopolite and
an ingénue in the same breath . . . Babitz takes the reader on
travels to New York and Rome, but California provides her main
canvas: a place where movie stars are discovered, earthquakes
reverberate, and beautiful women overdose on drugs.” —Publishers
Weekly
“[A] charming tour guide who takes a wasteland and gives us back a
wonderland.” —Steffie Nelson, New York Magazine
“Her voice on the page is no less mesmerizing than her presence in
a room . . . The singular spectrum of her adventures, her friends,
and her tastes reveal themselves in her unconventional and
delightful dedication page(s).” —Nicole Jones, Vanity Fair
"Eve Babitz, whose autobiographical vignettes of LA had an
easygoing Mediterranean warmth and acceptance (she didn't billboard
over the dark side of LA and Hollywood, she just didn't elevate it
into a noir nihilism) that was the antithesis of Joan Didion's
desert vision of bleached bones beneath numbed nerves. The pleasure
principle still prevailed in Eve's writing, whatever the setbacks
and heartbreaks." —James Wolcott, Vanity Fair
"Her voice manages to be both serious and happy, with a run-on
syntax that feels like a friend on her second glass of wine.
Relentlessly unsentimental, she sees people for who they are,
regardless of who she wants them to be . . . In Eve's Hollywood,
she writes with the aching immediacy of adolescence and the
wide-angle perspective of a woman much older—and she's only in her
20s." —Holly Brubach, The New York Times
"What truly sets Babitz apart from L.A. writers like Didion or
Nathanael West . . . is that no matter what cruel realities she
might face, a part of her still buys the Hollywood fantasy, feels
its magnetic pull as much as that Midwestern hopeful who heads to
the coast in pursuit of 'movie dreams.'" —Steffie Nelson, The Los
Angeles Review of Books
"Eve Babitz is a little like Madame de Sevigne, that inveterate
letter-writer of Louis XIV's time, transposed to the Chateau
Marmont in the late 20th-Century—lunching, chatting, dressing,
loving and crying in Hollywood, that latter-day Versailles."
—Mollie Gregory, The Los Angeles Times
"As the cynosure of the counterculture, Eve Babitz knew everybody
worth knowing; slept with everybody worth sleeping with and better
still, made herself felt in every encounter." —Daniel Bernardi,
PopMatters
“Her romp through ’70s L.A. winkingly fulfills the promises of
pleasure and delight so often scorched to nil by writers like Joan
Didion.” —Ian Epstein, Vulture
“Eve’s Hollywood—a memoir of sorts that detailed her life growing
up in California, attending Hollywood High, and hanging out with a
bevy of rock and art stars—announced Babitz as a writer
with a brand of glamour that was sophisticated yet gritty,
intellectual with a lust for life and also for, well, sex. Her
writing moves as fast as her nights.” —Garage
“Spanning from her childhood in the 50s to Janis Joplin’s death in
1970, Babitz takes us on a cerebral joyride through Los Angeles’s
dive bars and beaches, riffing off her many lost nights at Sunset
Boulevard’s Chateau Marmont and legendary tiki bar The Luau.” —Kat
Lister, The Guardian
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