Black Swans: Stories

“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 Château 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.