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

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

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

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

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Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781681370088
Publisher: New York Review Books
Publication date: 08/30/2016
Series: NYRB Classics Series
Pages: 184
Sales rank: 42,504
Product dimensions: 5.00(w) x 8.01(h) x 0.42(d)

About the Author

Eve Babitz is the author of several books of fiction, including Sex and Rage: Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time, L.A. Woman, and Black Swans: Stories. Her nonfiction works include Fiorucci, the Book and Two by Two: Tango, Two-Step, and the L.A. Night. She has written for publications including Ms. and Esquire and in the late 1960s designed album covers for the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Linda Ronstadt. Her novel Eve’s Hollywood is published by NYRB Classics.

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, as well as a nonfiction book of film criticism. He is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Table of Contents

Introduction vii

Slow Days 5

Bakersfield 11

The Flimsies 29

Dodger Stadium 39

Heroine 51

Sirocco 65

Rain 77

Bad Day at Palm Springs 95

Emerald Bay 123

The Garden of Allah 137

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