Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
A new reissue by the writer who has been acclaimed by the Boston Globe as a "true original" and by the San Francisco Chronicle as "marvelously witty and wildly observant" and of whom Joseph Heller has said, "Her words are worth one hundred moving pictures." Black Swans is a collection of nine stories that look back on the 1980s--a decade of dreams, drink, and stoned youth turning Republican. Babitz prowls California telling tales of a changing world. She writes about the Rodeo Gardens, about AIDS, about learning to tango, about the cemetery of Hollywood, the self-enchanted city, and, most importantly, about the envy and jealousy underneath it all.
Babitz's inimitable voice propels these stories forward, corralling everything that gets in their way: sex, rage, the Chateau Marmont, youth, beauty, Jim Morrison, men, women, and black swans.
This exciting reissue further celebrates the phenomenon of Eve Babitz, cementing her reputation as the voice of a generation.
"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." --Los Angeles Times
Synopsis
"Babitz's talent for the brilliant line, honed to a point, never interferes with her feel for languid pleasures." --The New York Times Book Review A new reissue of Babitz's collection of nine stories that look back on the 1980s and early 1990s--decades of dreams, drink, and glimpses of a changing world. Black Swans further celebrates the phenomenon of Eve Babitz, cementing her reputation as the voice of a generation.
"On the page, Babitz is pure pleasure--a perpetual-motion machine of no-stakes elation and champagne fizz." --The New Yorker
" A] true original." --The Boston Globe
"She's a natural. Or gives every appearance of being one, her writing elevated yet slangy, bright, bouncy, cheerfully hedonistic--L.A. in it purest, most idealized form." --Vanity Fair
"Babitz's writing is also like the jacaranda tree in glorious bloom--bewitching an entire city, but all too brief." --Los Angeles Review of Books