Description Hide Description- Show Description+
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 in Fall 2015, Slow Days, Fast Company is poised to become a favorite of Babitz fans new and old, too.
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.
Author: Eve Babitz
Paperback Published 15 September 2016 184 pages
"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