Eve’s Hollywood: A Confessional L.A. Novel.

BABITZ, Eve.

$4,200.00

Item Number: 148299

New York: Delacorte Press / Seymour Lawrence, 1974.

First edition of the author’s classic first work. Octavo, original half cloth. Boldly signed by Eve Babitz on the half-title page. Fine in a near fine dust jacket with a touch of shelfwear. Photograph by Annie Liebovitz. Jacket design by Irving Bogen. An exceptional example, rare and desirable signed.

Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: by the time she’d hit thirty, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles. Immortalized as the nude beauty facing down Duchamp and as one of Ed Ruscha’s Five 1965 Girlfriends, Babitz’s first book showed her to be a razor-sharp writer with tales of her own. Eve’s Hollywood is an album of vivid snapshots of Southern California’s haute bohemians, of outrageously beautiful high-school ingenues and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of rock stars sleeping it off at the Chateau Marmont. And though Babitz’s prose might appear careening, she’s in control as she takes us on a ride through an LA of perpetual delight, from a joint serving the perfect taquito, to the corner of La Brea and Sunset where we make eye contact with a roller-skating hooker, to the Watts Towers. This “daughter of the wasteland” is here to show us that her city is no wasteland at all but a glowing landscape of swaying fruit trees and blooming bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and the Santa Ana winds—and every bit as seductive as she is.