Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A.

Description

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.

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Other editions

• 

  Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A.

  • 2016-08-30
  • 184 pages
  • Ebook
  • New York Review of Books

Similar books

• 

  Black Swans: Stories

  By Eve Babitz

  And maybe Audrey Hepburn. “Only mine are better,” she explained. “But men hate pancake makeup,” I'd say, since they did. “Fuck 'em!” she sneered, scornfully, and she was right because, in her case, they made an exception.

• 

  I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz

  By Eve Babitz

  It was exactly what you'd think Audrey Hepburn would wear, to go with her pearls, her eyes, and her voice. It was the scent of unbelievably good taste, with just an edge of blissful sex. It was happiness. It was not a statement about ...

• 

  Eve's Hollywood

  By Eve Babitz

  Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: by the time she’d hit thirty, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles.

• 

  L.A.WOMAN

  By Eve Babitz

  Sophie and Lola, like the many other women who move in and out of this electric saga know that while L.A. is constantly changing it is essentially eternal; through their eyes we see the mixture of high culture and low, the promises of youth ...

• 

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

  By Lili Anolik

  The quintessential biography of Eve Babitz (1943-2021), the brilliant chronicler of 1960s and 70s Hollywood hedonism and one of the most original American voices of her time. “I practically snorted this book, stayed up all night with it.

• 

  Cassandra at the Wedding

  By Dorothy Baker

  I'm not, at heart, a jumper; it's not my sort of thing . . . I think I knew all the time I was sizing up the bridge that the...

• 

  Slow Days, Fast Friends

  By Erik Brooks

  Howard the cheetah loves being fast.

• 

  Two by Two: Tango, Two-Step, and the L.A. Night

  By Eve Babitz

  Eve brings the flirtatious energy of dancing alive like no other writer. Two by Two is not a book that teaches you how to dance, but it will surely make you want to learn once you've read it.

• 

  Sex & Rage: Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time

  By Eve Babitz

  It is the 1970s in LA, and Jacaranda Leven - child of sun and surf - is swept into the dazzling cultural milieu of the beautiful people. Floating on a...

• 

  The Dud Avocado

  By Elaine Dundy

  It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm).” –Groucho Marx "[The Dud Avocado] is one of the best novels about growing up fast..." -The Guardian