List Price: $16.95 Details

Save: $1.66 (10%)

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

FREE delivery Friday, February 10 if you spend $25 on items shipped by Amazon

Or fastest delivery Thursday, February 9. Order within 15 hrs 59 mins

In Stock.

[{"displayPrice":"$15.29","priceAmount":15.29,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"15","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"29","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"wJIxWwi9Y7TKy55XssnOu%2Bf5OPHowB69bgPb15o0U5yNdZqs0xxyBCwLpnswJ2eGREKXQyq0DubpcsIONtfLXjgvs5vGJSSMvWE%2FNi3kXNHQbuBk76heQPjV4b7pyh4ZHZwz%2F68tqUqix1j%2FlUaNgw%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW"},{"displayPrice":"$13.96","priceAmount":13.96,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"13","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"96","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"%2FImSYq7CayvwYoAJEuL6mOexqQgpyy%2FLmSYYmC6c3G6v4BbOGIww%2F0Z2jN3dFl%2BGM%2Bkn3pYrimr2YgOyeHg8R54%2F72dyjnGoVsHBhra%2FQIkbY%2BO65GJADYPB7IBalLiNX2A8KMjvLx2LfNOKynPK8s2TsfjDXZMkCzI8Oy6qYBmZ%2Bp%2Fz3RoeGv%2Bw6XEy%2BR9j","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED"}]

$$15.29 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Secure transaction

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Details

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Return policy: Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

FREE delivery February 13 - 15. Details

Or fastest delivery February 10 - 14. Details

Select delivery location

Used: Very Good | Details

Sold by b4cause

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Other Sellers on Amazon

Added

Not added

$15.10
& FREE Shipping

Sold by: Book Depository US

Added

Not added

$11.40
+ $3.99 shipping

Sold by: Gama1521

Added

Not added

$15.79
& FREE Shipping

Sold by: MyPrepbooks

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See this image

Follow the Author

Eve Babitz

Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. (New York Review Books Classics) Paperback – August 30, 2016

by Eve Babitz (Author), Matthew Specktor (Introduction)

544 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$10.99

—

Audible Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

Free with your Audible trial

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$199.01

$176.46

$99.94

Paperback

"Please retry"

$15.29

$10.92

$9.11

Audio CD

"Please retry"

$22.74

$9.99

Kindle
$10.99 Read with Our Free App
Audiobook
$0.00 Free with your Audible trial
Hardcover
$199.01

9 Used from $99.94 1 New from $176.46 1 Collectible from $87.99
Paperback
$15.29

26 Used from $9.11 30 New from $10.92
Audio CD
$22.74

1 Used from $9.99 2 New from $22.74

Enhance your purchase

No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated “its own kind of moral laws,” spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and ’70s. One man proved elusive, however, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. Slow Days, Fast Company is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California that far exceeds its mash-note premise. In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind–swept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movie stars distraught over their success, socialites on three-day drug binges holed up in the Chateau Marmont, soap-opera actors worried that tomorrow’s script will kill them off, Italian femmes fatales even more fatal than Babitz. And she even leaves LA now and then, spending an afternoon at the house of flawless Orange County suburbanites, a day among the grape pickers of the Central Valley, a weekend in Palm Springs where her dreams of romance fizzle and her only solace is Virginia Woolf. In the end it doesn’t matter if Babitz ever gets the guy—she seduces us.

Print length

184 pages
Language

English
Publisher

NYRB Classics
Publication date

August 30, 2016
Dimensions

5.03 x 0.4 x 7.99 inches
ISBN-10

1681370085
ISBN-13

978-1681370088
See all details

Frequently bought together

+
+

Total price:

To see our price, add these items to your cart.

Choose items to buy together.

by Eve Babitz Paperback
$15.29
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Get it as soon as Friday, Feb 10
by Eve Babitz Paperback
$14.95
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Get it as soon as Friday, Feb 10
by Eve Babitz Paperback
$15.59
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Get it as soon as Friday, Feb 10

Eve Babitz
352
Paperback
54 offers from $10.49
Patti Smith
295
Hardcover
48 offers from $16.45
Eve Babitz
268
Paperback
44 offers from $12.06
Eve Babitz
321
Paperback
11 offers from $9.29
Ottessa Moshfegh
1,124
Paperback
66 offers from $7.90
Joan Didion
2,198
Paperback
85 offers from $3.87

Editorial Reviews

Review

"One of the truly original writers of 20th-century Los Angeles." —Kevin Dettmar, The Atlantic

“Los Angeles-born glamour girl, bohemian, artist, muse, sensualist, wit and pioneering foodie Eve Babitz...reads like Nora Ephron by way of Joan Didion, albeit with more lust and drugs and tequila...Reading Babitz is like being out on the warm open road at sundown, with what she called, in another book, '4/60 air conditioning' — that is, going 60 miles per hour with all four windows down. You can feel the wind in your hair.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Her writing took multiple forms. . . . But in the center was always Babitz and her sensibility—fun and hot and smart, a Henry James–loving party girl.” —Naomi Fry, New Republic

“Babitz takes to the page lightly, slipping sharp observations into roving, conversational essays and perfecting a kind of glamorous shrug.” —Kaitlin Phillips, Bookforum

"[Babitz] achieved that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, is purely enjoyable enough to be mistaken for simple entertainment. It’s a tradition that includes Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire, Preston Sturges, Ed Ruscha, and, it goes without saying, Marilyn Monroe.” —Lili Anolik, Vanity Fair

“What we now call a ‘fictive memoir’ comes in the form of ten extended anecdotes about Los Angeles, delivered with all the gossipy sprezzatura of the most desirable dinner guest. Food, drink, drugs, sex, sunsets and a surfeit of move stars soak these tales with colour, while the most colourful component of all is our narrator herself.” —Hermione Hoby, TLS

“Babitz' collection of essays, Slow Days, Fast Company, the best non-fiction written about the Joys of Sensuous LA, I have always thought right up there with Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”—Lee Grove, Boston Globe

“Imagine the incisive wit of Virginia Woolf mingling with the listlessness of Françoise Sagan—this is the work of Eve Babitz, an ingenue and poet. Her lyrical sensuality is both sexy and cerebral…this book sizzles with hedonistic abandon, sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll…it is the clarity of her language and her painterly style that cement her place in the pantheon of American literature.” —Sarah Nasar, bookseller at Atlantis Books (Santorini), British Airways High Life Magazine

“Eve Babitz was Los Angeles' greatest bard. Promiscuous but discerning, the bombshell with a brain bonded with Joan Didion and bedded Jim Morrison… Babitz is finally getting the literary comeback she deserves.” —Lili Loofbourow, The Week

"[The] radiantly specific Slow Days, Fast Company...might serve to explicate LA better than any other book I’ve ever read... Like her generational and aesthetic peer Renata Adler, Babitz has a nervous, windblown eye, a knack for perceptual and associative leaps. Like her West Coast fellow Joan Didion, she has a stringent–in fact, rather stark–intelligence...Babitz’s perceptions, her aphoristic formulations, are legion and strike me as both startling and profound.”—Matthew Specktor, Tin House blog

“Babitz’s sentences—fluffy, golden, and spunky—which appear flippant…but like Marilyn Monroe infusing the ditz with closeted intellectualism, Babitz has a genius for revealing the depths of ostensibly shallow waters.” —Monica McClure,The Culture Trip

“Her dishy, evocative style has never been characterized as Joan Didion-deep but it's inarguably more fun and inviting, providing equally sharp insights on the mood and meaning of Southern California.”—Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune

"Undeniably the work of a native, in love with her place. This quality of the intrinsic and the indigenous is precisely what has been mising from almost all the fiction about Hollywood...the accuracy and feeling with which she delineates LA is a fresh quality in California writing."—Larry McMurtry, Washington Post

“In these ten cajoling tales, Los Angeles is the patient, the heroine, hero, victim, and aggressor: the tales a marvel of free-form madness. Like Renata Adler, Eve Babitz has fact, never telling too much”—Vogue

"Babitz loves LA. These ten pieces are a love story about her city...slick and clever as ever, and keenly perceptive as ever."—Michele M. Leber, Library Journal

About the Author

Eve Babitz is the author of several books of fiction, including Sex and Rage: Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time, L.A. Woman, and Black Swans: Stories. Her nonfiction works include Fiorucci, the Book and Two by Two: Tango, Two-Step, and the L.A. Night. She has written for publications including Ms. and Esquire and in the late 1960s designed album covers for the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Linda Ronstadt. Her novel Eve’s Hollywood is published by NYRB Classics.

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, as well as a nonfiction book of film criticism. He is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ NYRB Classics; Main edition (August 30, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 184 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1681370085
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1681370088
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.7 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.03 x 0.4 x 7.99 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #23,665 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #13 in Humorous American Literature
- #120 in Biographical Fiction (Books)
- #525 in Humorous Fiction

Customer Reviews:
544 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Eve Babitz

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5

544 global ratings

5 star		57%
4 star		25%
3 star		12%
2 star		4%
1 star		2%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Reviews with images

See all customer images

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Clint Catalyst

4.5

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 22, 2023

Verified Purchase

What took me so long to discover Eve Babitz? I live for a good memoir and Babitz was a writer who did exactly that: lived. In her novella Slow Days, Fast Company, Babitz stitches her shrewd cultural observations of LA in the ‘60s-‘70s and her romantic entanglements together like the brightly-hued tattoos on a Sunset Strip-devotee’s sleeve.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 23, 2022

Verified Purchase

With some books, one read just isn't enough. That's how I've always felt about this one. Every year or so I pull this slim volume off my shelf and read it again--sometimes cover-to-cover, sometimes just chapters that I'm especially in the mood for. Yes, I know it's not PC to love L.A., but having gone to high school in the Valley (before the invention of Valley Girls) I can't help it. L.A. is and always will be a part of me. And Eve Babitz is L.A. I’m so glad I bought this edition when it came out because the other covers are exceedingly boring compared to the amusing and arresting drawing of an Afghan Hound in a turtleneck sweater, sitting in a café. The ten jewel-like memoirs/stories take me to a different place that no longer exists except in my dreams. Babitz is a fabulous writer and a fascinating woman. Read it. I can say no more.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

DaveP

Slow Days, Not So Slow Company

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 18, 2016

Verified Purchase

I very much enjoyed reading this, but it falls short of the top grade for a couple of reasons: 1) the "company" is not really very fast: the only interesting character is Eve herself, the only wit is hers in observing, the only interesting comments are hers. There aren't any real conversations, nothing to give it that zip of human interaction. 2) whether fast or slow none of the characters other than Eve come alive as real people. 3) at times the incidents described seem rather banal and not much different from the experiences of people who were not rich and famous. I was 20 in 1967, went to Woodstock in '69, to San Fran in '71, had a wild time without much money, until I slowed down a bit at 30 and went back to school. Aside from the luxury, the life she's describing seemed pretty tame to me, especially considering that it covers the same time period of the sixties and seventies that my generation experienced.
With that being said, the book is a fun read because of Eve herself. She does not engage in self-aggrandizement and pokes fun at herself as well as others. Her satire is witty but not vicious, there's no sense that she's settling old scores even if she is. There are some great lines (which I cannot quote because I've already sent the book to a woman friend who I know will love it) which say so much with so few words that you have to be careful not to gloss over something without getting the full implications. And she is not pretentious, she's not trying to be any kind of writer except herself. That's refreshing in this era of pseudo-literary crud. So if you're feeling lazy on a Sunday (or whenever), curl up with this book, and you'll have a great time without having to get out of bed.

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

A. Shen

An anthology that’s perfectly Angeleno

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 11, 2022

Verified Purchase

I loved her subject matter and prose. This is a must read for any Angeleno.

Helpful

Grace Fortiter

Good if you want to dig LA as it was / is for natives

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 26, 2016

Verified Purchase

Flashy, very L.A. in the 70s from a woman who grew up there and went to HS in Hollywood. Funny, sassy, in the end sad because so many women seem to feel their lives are over past 40 and the freshness of high-heeled youth. Funny satire of Emerald Beach Laguna, WASP rich haven from the nonwhite, nonProt, nonPreppy. I enjoyed it, as someone who spent teenage years of the 50s in Pasadena, CA and went on HS weekends to Balboa and Newport Beach, drove over hills and ranches to Laguna -- where Riverside now is! Unrecognizable.

18 people found this helpful

Helpful

Christine G. Friedman

really wanted to love this

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 19, 2022

Verified Purchase

Wanted to peek into the wild(er) days of LA. See what this libertine had to say about the early days of the battle of feminism. Too many phrases like this: “ it all looked like my restaurant. My very own. It was comfortable and clubby in a very snotty English colonial beat-the-natives-if-you-catch-them-stealing but deal-out-prodigious-kindness-for-loyalty way. “ and “there’s a waitress in every woman.” You sense her being wry in a way that was accepted at the time, but… no thanks.

8 people found this helpful

Helpful

Vishishta

A treasure!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 18, 2021

Verified Purchase

How did I miss this beautiful collection! Although a native Angelino, I’ve just no stumbled across this lovely writing. She captures the dream in perfect language.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

sydney vaughn

*

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 22, 2021

Verified Purchase

Dreamy. Utterly dreamy. It’ll enchant you so much that you’ll unknowingly be able to finish it in a day. And then be sad and wishing for more once you realize it’s over.

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Nicola Roberts

Glamour

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 2, 2019

Verified Purchase

Glamorous and beautifully written

Nikita Poddar

Witty, sarcastic and full of vigour

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on March 17, 2019

Verified Purchase

Read Babitz when you're not in a mood to read, when you want to give your dilapidated heart another chance, when you're craving a cocktail of sensible conversations, when you are mobbed by insecurities and when the flashy world seems too flashy.

Babitz observes and delivers in a way that seems like a prerequisite for commentary on the obvious as well as the not so obvious course of actions.

4 people found this helpful

Nickolette Stefanova-Kiryazov

Hot & Glamorous Without Being Stupid

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on April 26, 2021

Verified Purchase

A nice reminder that reading can be pure fun.
My group of friends are re-discovering Babitz and reading and sharing different parts.

jose luis pissarro

the taext and the craft quality of the book, which are very high quality

Reviewed in Spain 🇪🇸 on January 15, 2019

Verified Purchase

I'm discovering this author, which I aprecciate very much for several reasons; I'm almost in love with her if I go to L.A. one time I'd like to have a drink with her she is a very gifted author - person; I feel very idenidied with her culture and

my age 71 is another factor; she sends me back to the times I was a young man and that is amazing .

Sal Hrycyk

Eve Babitz! Eve Babitz! Eve Babitz!

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on April 23, 2017

Verified Purchase

Can't believe I've never read her before. Dead-pan and hilarious, with real boots-on-the-ground/head-in-the-clouds observational style. Captures everything I like about LA, with the deep anti-vapidity stance of a jaded party girl with a steel trap mind. Delicious.

4 people found this helpful

See all reviews

Buy new: $15.29$15.29 FREE delivery: Friday, Feb 10 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon. Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com

Buy Used: $13.96

Other Sellers on Amazon

Follow the Author

Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. (New York Review Books Classics) Paperback – August 30, 2016

Enhance your purchase

Frequently bought together

More items to explore

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Product details

Videos

About the author

Eve Babitz

Customer reviews

Reviews with images

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries

Buy new:

$15.29

FREE delivery: Friday, Feb 10 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon.

Ships from: Amazon.com

Sold by: Amazon.com

Buy Used:

$13.96