Eve Babitz, the woman who lived and knew how to narrate the glamour of 1970s Hollywood like no one else, premieres in Brazil through Amarcord.
Slow Days, Fleeting Encounters presents Eve Babitz's Los Angeles. Hot, fast, ephemeral, imperious, sensual. A city that makes no apologies for not being a city, despite the sidelong glances some cast at its filth, disorganization, and vibrant colors. In the LA of the sixties and seventies, you can find Janis Joplin in a pool, take a drive with a famous film director, party with anguished stars, and even visit friends hiding out at the famed Chateau Marmont. But to do that, you need to know the right crowd. And Eve Babitz is one of them.
In ten short stories, the writer and visual artist describes the glamour and decadence of LA that only those who lived through the era of "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" can describe. But what at first glance might seem like an extravagant adventure is, in fact, a delicious, acidic, and intelligent autofiction that expands the boundaries of the imagination and the limits of the city itself.
Eve Babitz was an event in herself. Renowned for her beauty and for freely experimenting with her desires, she cultivated friends, lovers, and behind-the-scenes stories from those bohemian years. Luckily for us, besides experiencing all of this, she knew how to narrate like no one else the summer days, the parties, the transience of life, and the vibrant Californian landscape, which sometimes drags on slow days, but is certainly balanced by its fleeting encounters. This is her debut with Amarcord.
“Eve Babitz didn't live a life free from the patriarchy, but her current readers might assume she found a way to circumvent it. Despite her proximity to the male-dominated machine, once part of Hollywood's elite circle, she rarely succumbed to male charm; instead, Eve Babitz always made everyone play by her own rules.” – Marie Solis, The Nation
"Eve Babitz writes like Chet Baker plays jazz—something luminous, ethereal, lyrical, but also rhythmic, detached, and sensual; or like Larry Bell builds his structures, glassy and with such simple, smooth, and light lines. She has a natural talent. Or makes it seem so, with her elegant yet urban, colorful, danceable, joyful, and hedonistic writing—it is Los Angeles in its purest, most idealized form."—Lili Anolik, Eve Babitz biographer, Vanity Fair
“Reading Eve Babitz is like being in the cool of sunset on a freeway, as she calls it in the book, with the air conditioning on 4/90, which is to say, it's like going sixty miles an hour with all four windows open. You feel the wind on your face.” – Dwight Garner, New York Times
Eve Babitz's style is cool, communicative, free, and yet charged with a poetry that seems effortless. Unlike her contemporary Joan Didion, Babitz doesn't gaze into the abyss and return to tell us; she wants to tell us about how good the light is within the abyss. – Andrew Male, The Guardian
"In ten seductive tales, Los Angeles is the patient, the heroine, the victim, and the aggressor: stories about the wonder of the madness of formless freedom. Like Renata Adler, Eve Babitz has the facts and never says too much." – Vogue
“Blurring the boundaries between essay and fiction, memoir and narrative, Eve Babitz made her life her art, and her art her life, in a way that must have been easier to envy from afar than for those caught in her orbit.” – Los Angeles Times
“Her writing describes a world of decadent glamour with precious detail, but also with the joyful expanse of an open heart, as frank as a conversation between close friends over a drink.” – Los Angeles Times
