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

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although i’d go so far as to say that the moments she wrote about in those stories weren’t all that glamorous. trips to a farm and palm springs couldn’t interest me less if the friends and lovers she writes about are as boring as a trigonometry class at school and if there aren’t any insightful observations about the places she goes to. Li, Lucy, "Beyond Nude Chess: Eve Babitz Embodied Bygone L.A." toutfait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal July 7, 2011 but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it’s held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right.

Kakutani, Michiko, "Books of The Times; Los Angeles Middle Agers Fighting the Old Ennui," New York Times, October 1, 1993

No one likes to be confronted with a bunch of disparate details that God only knows what they mean. I can’t get a thread to go through to the end and make a straightforward novel. I can’t keep everything in my lap, or stop rising flurries of sudden blind meaning. But perhaps if the details are all put together, a certain pulse and sense of place will emerge, and the integrity of empty space with occasional figures in the landscape can be understood at leisure and in full, no matter how fast the company.

Tolentino, Jia. "The "Sex and Rage" of Eve Babitz". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on February 23, 2021 . Retrieved April 21, 2021.You are perfect for Los Angeles, you know. You’re like the lady whom everyone’s in love with but they hate themselves for it because you’re all wrong. They don’t have anything to go on with you. No precedents. You’re voluptuous and too smart and too kind and too mean, and you give everyone just what they want and then you get sad and bland . . . I used to wonder why you dressed the way you did—one minute I see you in those old shirts and that scarf! . . . and the next you’re at some art thing and I see women look at you when you don’t know it and they’re all wondering how in the hell you did it. You glow.” Eve Babitz". New York Review Books. Archived from the original on April 21, 2021 . Retrieved April 21, 2021. Schudel, Matt (December 19, 2021). "Eve Babitz, who chronicled and reveled in Hollywood hedonism, dies at 78". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Archived from the original on December 20, 2021 . Retrieved December 20, 2021. Reading Eve Babitz is like being out on the warm open road at sundown, with what she called, in another book, '4/60 air conditioning' — that is, going 60 miles per hour with all four windows down. You can feel the wind in your hair. 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.