BABITZ, Eve.

£1,250 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Black Swans. 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).

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