Books

First edition, first printing, signed by the author on the title page. Babitz has been likened to F. Scott Fitzgerald for her fictionalized portrayal of a dazzling cultural milieu, in her case 1970s Los Angeles and her adventures there as the "It" girl of Hollywood. "If anyone partook of '70s L.A., it was Eve. It was Quaaludes, coke, screwing around a ton, it was that post-pill, pre-AIDS moment that she fully, fully embraced" (Kilkenny). This story collection "deftly chronicles the shifting mores and slow-burn fadeouts of 1980s Hollywood; a potent melancholy hangs over the stories and a bittersweet acceptance that no party, no matter how high the high, can truly last forever" (Aylmer). Babitz (1943-2021) first gained notoriety in 1963 through Julian Wasser's iconic photograph of her playing chess nude against the artist Marcel Duchamp. As a writer, she was praised by Joan Didion and Joseph Heller but went widely under-appreciated until the release of a 2014 media profile of her life in Vanity Fair. Her works have since been reissued and published in translation for the first time. In response to her sudden emergence as feminist icon to millenials, Babitz quipped, "My whole life, I always got attention from men, and now it's girls who like me" (quoted in Kilkenny). Olivia Aylmer, "Eve Babitz Is Better Than Ever", Vanity Fair, 18 April 2018; Katie Kilkenny, "How 1970s 'It' Girl Eve Babitz Became Young Hollywood's Latest Obsession", Hollywood Reporter, 7 Jan. 2019. Octavo. Original black quarter cloth and boards, spine lettered in gilt, publisher's device on rear cover in blind, fore edge untrimmed. With dust jacket. Light fading to cloth spine, gilt unaffected and bright, contents clean; jacket with minor rubbing, still sharp, a few spots on verso, unclipped: a near-fine copy in like jacket.

Black Swans is a collection of nine spare and perfectly controlled short stories set in Los Angeles that mark Babitz’s return to the form after several novels and a collection of journalism.