Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.

Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.

â€œI practically snorted this book, stayed up all night with it. Anolik decodes, ruptures, and ultimately intensifies Eveâ€™s singular irresistible glitz.â€ â€”Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

â€œThe Eve Babitz book Iâ€™ve been waiting for. What emerges isnâ€™t just a portrait of a writer, but also of Los Angeles: sprawling, melancholic, and glamorous.â€ â€”Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter

Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s was the pop culture capital of the worldâ€”a movie factory, a music factory, a dream factory. Eve Babitz was the ultimate factory girl, a pure product of LA.

The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Babitz posed in 1963, at age twenty, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph, cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed: for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to name but a very few.

Then, at nearly thirty, her It girl days numbered, Babitz was discoveredâ€”as a writerâ€”by Joan Didion. She would go on to produce seven books, usually billed as novels or short story collections, always autobiographies and confessionals. Under-known and under-read during her career, sheâ€™s since experienced a breakthrough. Now in her mid-seventies, sheâ€™s on the cusp of literary stardom and recognition as an essentialâ€”as the essentialâ€”LA writer. Her prose achieves that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, and is so sheerly enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment.

For Babitz, life was slow days, fast company until a freak fire in the 90s turned her into a recluse, living in a condo in West Hollywood, where Lili Anolik tracked her down in 2012. Anolikâ€™s elegant and provocative new book is equal parts biography and detective story. It is also on dangerously intimate terms with its subject: artist, writer, muse, and one-woman zeitgeist, Eve Babitz.
Country USA
Manufacturer Scribner
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2019-01-08
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Scribner
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2019-01-08
Format	Kindle eBook

Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.

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