Black Swans: Stories

Bought as a gift. Arrived beautifully and brand new. I know my girl friend will love it.

Buen libro y buen servicio de de entrega

To love Eve Babitz is to mourn the fact that each "new" book that comes out -- in reality, mere re-releases of out-of-print earlier editions -- moves us closer to the day when there will be no more work to publish. The only unreprinted book she has left is TWO BY TWO (1999), about her late-stage obsession with dancing the Tango, a subject also covered in some depth here.In the meantime, celebrate the magnificence of this penultimate collection of "stories" (more like "essays" or "autobiographical sketches with the names changed," not that it matters much). There was a decade-plus gap between L.A. WOMAN (1981) and BLACK SWANS (1992), and I had worried the interim might have diminished Babitz's skills. This was, in retrospect, rather stupid of me. If anything her abilities only sharpened, her ways of linking certain self-obsessions with the wider world growing exponentially. Though it's hard to compare anything to the sheer burst of joy and exuberance that was EVE'S HOLLYWOOD, BLACK SWANS is a close second place. Witty, brilliant, self-effacing and profound all at once, it makes you want to track down her agent and beg for another book. Just one more, to let us know how Eve is doing now.

Boring and entirely unintriguing.

Eve Babitz is an LA writer who writes about LA in beautiful prose to reveal the magic, sadness, and beauty ofboth the city and her relationships.