Black Swans: Stories, Paperback

Descriere

``Babitz's talent for the brilliant line, honed to a point, never interferes with her feel for languid pleasures.`` --The New York Times Book Review ``On the page, Babitz is pure pleasure--a perpetual-motion machine of no-stakes elation and champagne fizz.`` --the New Yorker ``The liveliness of Babitz's] portraits and plates-in-the-air precariousness of her storytelling reach through the decades to entertain a completely new audience . . . The ultimate effect of this Angeleno's writing is to cast her beloved, glamorous town in the main role. And what a performance it is.`` --ELLE. COM A new reissue by the writer acclaimed by The Boston Globe as a ``true original`` and by the San Francisco Chronicle as ``marvelously witty and wildly observant,`` and of whom Joseph Heller has said, ``Her words are worth one hundred moving pictures.`` Black Swans is a collection of nine stories that look back on the 1980s and early 1990s--decades of dreams, drink, and stoned youth turning Republican. Babitz prowls California, telling tales of a changing world. She writes about the Rodeo Gardens, about AIDS, about learning to tango, about the Hollywood Cemetery, about the self-enchanted city, and, most important, about the envy and jealousy underneath it all. Babitz's inimitable voice propels these stories forward, corralling everything that gets in their way: sex, rage, the Chateau Marmont, youth, beauty, Jim Morrison, men, women, and black swans. This exciting reissue further celebrates the phenomenon of Eve Babitz, cementing her reputation as the voice of a generation.