Eve's Hollywood
  • Published: 15 October 2015
  • ISBN: 9781590178904
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $38.00

Eve's Hollywood

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An autobiographical novel by Eve Babitz, iconic L.A. "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.

A legendary love letter to Los Angeles by the city's most charming daughter, complete with portraits of rock stars at Chateau Marmont, surfers in Santa Monica, prostitutes on sunset, and Eve's own beloved cat, Rosie. 

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. 
  • Published: 15 October 2015
  • ISBN: 9781590178904
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $38.00
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Praise for Eve's Hollywood

Praise for Eve Babitz

"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, L.A. 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, L.A. 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