Slow Days, Fast Company (New York Review Books Classics): The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

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Babitz] achieved that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, is purely enjoyable enough to be mistaken for simple entertainment. It’s a tradition that includes Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire, Preston Sturges, Ed Ruscha, and, it goes without saying, Marilyn Monroe.”—Lili Anolik, Vanity Fair

What we now call a ‘fictive memoir’ comes in the form of ten extended anecdotes about Los Angeles, delivered with all the gossipy sprezzatura of the most desirable dinner guest. Food, drink, drugs, sex, sunsets and a surfeit of move stars soak these tales with colour, while the most colourful component of all is our narrator herself.”—Hermione Hoby, TLS Undeniably the work of a native, in love with her place. This quality of the intrinsic and the indigenous is precisely what has been missing from almost all the fiction about Hollywood...the accuracy and feeling with which she delineates LA is a fresh quality in California writing. Eve Babitz". New York Review Books. Archived from the original on April 21, 2021 . Retrieved April 21, 2021. 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.

Babitz, Eve (November 3, 1999). Two by Two: Tango, Two-Step, and the L.A. Night (First Printinged.). New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 9780684833927. Eve Babitz". Counterpoint Press. January 25, 2017. Archived from the original on April 21, 2021 . Retrieved April 21, 2021.

The New York Public Library convened a 2016 panel on "The Eve Effect" that included actress Zosia Mamet and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino. [25] [10] In 2017, Hulu announced it would be developing a comedy series based on Babitz's memoirs, a project led by Liz Tigelaar, Amy Pascal, and Elizabeth Cantillon. [26] In 1997, Babitz was severely injured while in her car when she accidentally dropped a lit match onto a gauze skirt, which ignited and melted her pantyhose beneath it. [17] While her lower legs were protected by the sheepskin Ugg boots she was wearing, the accident caused life-threatening third-degree burns to over half of her body. [4] :357–358 Because she had no health insurance, friends and family organized a fund-raising auction to pay her medical bills. Friends and former lovers donated cash and artworks to help pay for her long recovery. Babitz became somewhat more reclusive after this incident, but was still willing to be interviewed on occasion. [6] In a 2000 interview with Ron Hogan of Beatrice magazine, Babitz said, "I've got other books to do that I'm working on." [2] When Hogan asked what those books would be about, Babitz replied: "One's fiction and the other's nonfiction. The nonfiction book is about my experiences in the hospital. The other's a fictionalized version of my parents' lives in Los Angeles, my father's Russian Jewish side and my mother's Cajun French side." [2] These books had not been published as of 2019 [update]. Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A.: Tales (1977) New York, NY: Knopf/Random House. ISBN 0394409841 LCCN 76-47922 OCLC 2645787

Eve Babitz began her independent career as an artist, working in the music industry for Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records, making album covers. In the late 1960s, she designed album covers for Linda Ronstadt, The Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield. Her most famous cover was a collage for the 1967 album Buffalo Springfield Again. What we now call a ‘fictive memoir’ comes in the form of ten extended anecdotes about Los Angeles, delivered with all the gossipy sprezzatura of the most desirable dinner guest. Food, drink, drugs, sex, sunsets and a surfeit of move stars soak these tales with colour, while the most colourful component of all is our narrator herself. Virginia Woolf said that people read fiction the same way they listen to gossip, so if you're reading this at all then you might as well read my private asides written so he'll read it. I have to be extremely funny and wonderful around him just to get his attention at all and it's a shame to let it all go for one person.” Slow Days, Fast Company is organized as a loose series of sketches. The thread that ties them together is Babitz herself, who often can be found openly contemplating herself. Her concern with her own magnetic appeal comes across less as vanity, however, than simple self-awareness – in her first book, Eve's Hollywood, she is frank: “I looked like Brigitte Bardot and I was Stravinsky’s goddaughter.” Babitz is aware both that her beauty and connections have given her a pass into a social realm inaccessible to most people, and simultaneously condemned her to inhabit a certain stereotype in the eyes of many onlookers. “I wasn’t as used to the new dumb questions, so when men I had once thought of as wise daddies now asked me 'How do you write?’ I did not try and spill red wine in their suede pants, I would just smile and say, 'On a typewriter in the mornings when there’s nothing else to do.’''