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PRAISE FOR EVE’S HOLLYWOOD

“Sharp and funny throughout, [Babitz] offers an almost cinematic portrait of Los Angeles: gritty, glamorous, toxic and intoxicating.”

—The New York Times

“Eve’s Hollywood has become a classic of L.A. life. The names in the dedication, Jim Morrison, David Geffen, Andy Warhol, Stephen Stills, and more, indicate the era and depth of this important book.”

—Steve Martin

“Eve Babitz is to prose what Chet Baker, with his light, airy style, lyrical but also rhythmic, detached but also sensuous, is to jazz, or what Larry Bell, with his glass confections, the lines so clean and fresh and buoyant, is to sculpture. She’s a natural. Or gives every appearance of being one, her writing elevated yet slangy, bright, bouncy, cheerfully hedonistic—L.A. in its purest, most idealized form.”

—Lili Anolik, Vanity Fair

“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, Los Angeles Times

“Eve’s Hollywood is less a straightforward story or tell-all than a sure-footed collection of elliptical yet incisive vignettes and essays about love, longing, beauty, sex, friendship, art, artifice, and above all, Los Angeles . . . Reading West (and Fante and Chandler and Cain and the like) made me want to go to Los Angeles. Babitz makes me feel like I’m there.”

—Deborah Shapiro, The Second Pass

“Her writing took multiple forms, from romans à clef to essayistic cultural commentaries to reviews to urban-life vignettes to short stories. But in the center was always Babitz and her sensibility—fun and hot and smart, a Henry James–loving party girl . . . The joy of Babitz’s writing is in her ability to suggest that an experience is very nearly out of language while still articulating its force within it.”

—New Republic

“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, Los Angeles Review of Books

“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