To a lot of people, the idea of an extended bed rest sounds like heaven. But the truth is, lying in bed you get no respect and being a burn patient is a visit to torture land,” she wrote. “Everyone keeps telling you to relax, which you have absolutely no way of doing anyway.” Here in this book, we discover Eve's adventures after she doesn't catch that train home in The Rules of Civility. I didn’t respond because I didn’t know how to. She wasn’t thanking me, and I don’t think I’d have been able to bear it if she was. (Eve didn’t do humbug emotions like gratitude.) There was a half smile on her face, and she was looking at me intently, something I couldn’t recall her ever having done before. I felt the need to speak, only I couldn’t think what to say. Couldn’t think, couldn’t think. Company,” her essay collection from 1977—also recently reissued—Babitz stops by the Chateau Marmont for a drink. Mid-conversation, she starts had already begun. “Predictably, and now a bit tiresomely,” a Kirkus review observed, the novel was about California, and “ Babitz’s L.A. weltschmerz has gotten rather clotty and overdone.” And still, Jacaranda was a few

Have you ever had an appetizer and asked why don't they turn that into an entree? That's what this novella is. Towles took one image from Rules of Civility and turned it into six interwoven stories about Evelyn Ross in old Hollywood. Just as Rules of Civility left you wanting more, which presumably resulted in this book, Eve in Hollywood leaves you wanting more of whatever Towles is cooking up next. Simply put, the book is great -- there is just not enough of it. Toward the end of Rules Of Civility, Eve boards a train from New York to Chicago, but never arrives. Six months later, she is seen in a photograph in a gossip magazine leaving the Tropicana Club in Los Angeles with Olivia de Havilland. You can tell that Towles wrote it, his voice shines through, but it’s pretentious, incredibly unorganized, and just a pain to read. I thought that maybe this was scrapped material from Rules, but all of the prose is B-grade when placed against the other novel.And to the Tartuffo con panna on the via Buffalo or the Piazza Navona where you think at last you're getting enough chocolate. And you might be.

Eve Babitz, the Hollywood bard, muse and reveller who with warmth and candour chronicled the excesses of her city in the 1960s and 1970s and became a cult figure to generations of readers, has died. She was 78. I hadn’t really liked Elizabeth Taylor until she took Debbie Reynolds’ husband away from her, and then I began to love Elizabeth Taylor,” she once wrote.And to L. Rust Hills for the ice cream story and the one about taking sides and anagrams. That Esquire is falling apart. Mine is Babe Vizet. All this sounds a little overblown and hysterical, I’ll grant you, and yet I believe now as I believed then that it’s accurate and true. Anything seemed possible – for art, that night,” she would remember. “Especially after all that red wine.” It is not absolutely necessary to have read RULES OF CIVILITY before reading EVE IN HOLLYWOOD, but I would suggest doing so. It not only removes some Spoilers, but it also provides side references that will cause the “knowing” among us to smile.

For me, it isn't about what Towles writes as much as HOW he writes. Elegant, thoughtful. I fall into his stories and just go wherever they take me. This time it was to Hollywood and Los Angeles in the ‘30s, with some interesting characters and stories. She was published in Rolling Stone and Vogue among other magazines and her books included Eve’s Hollywood, Slow Days, Fast Company and Sex and Rage. Some were called fiction, others non-fiction, but virtually all drew directly from her life – with only the names changed. Sally had become a platinum blonde, which made her look like Kim Novak with a brain, and her career, as she referred to her life, looked like it might do something. She actually could act. Like the movie stars who had fascinated her since childhood, she was a master of entrances. Her first major public appearance came in 1963, aged 20, in one of the art world’s most famous photographs: Babitz, in the nude, plays chess with the fully clothed Marcel Duchamp.In a decade, people are going to be teaching courses centered around his work. As creative as Dinesen, but with a thoroughly American voice. Maybe the next Twain? In this chain of six richly detailed and atmospheric stories, each told from a different perspective, Towles unfolds the events that take Eve to the heart of Old Hollywood. Beginning in the dining car of the Golden State Limited in September 1938, we follow Eve to the elegant rooms of the Beverly Hills Hotel, the fabled tables of Antonio’s, the amusement parks on the Santa Monica piers, the afro-Cuban dance clubs of Central Avenue, and ultimately the set of Gone with The Wind. début, “ Eve’s Hollywood,” Babitz pays manic, tossed-off tribute “to the Didion-Dunnes for having to be who I’m not,” “to time immemorial and