Lili Anolik

ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 “I practically snorted this book, stayed up all night with it. Anolik decodes, ruptures, and ultimately intensifies Eve’s singular irresistible glitz.” —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker “The Eve Babitz book I’ve been waiting for. What emerges isn’t just a portrait of a writer, but also of Los Angeles: sprawling, melancholic, and glamorous.” —Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s was the pop culture capital of the world—a movie factory, a music factory, a dream factory. Eve Babitz was the ultimate factory girl, a pure product of LA. The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Babitz posed in 1963, at age twenty, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph, cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed: for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to name but a very few. Then, at nearly thirty, her It girl days numbered, Babitz was discovered—as a writer—by Joan Didion. She would go on to produce seven books, usually billed as novels or short story collections, always autobiographies and confessionals. Under-known and under-read during her career, she’s since experienced a breakthrough. Now in her mid-seventies, she’s on the cusp of literary stardom and recognition as an essential—as the essential—LA writer. Her prose achieves that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, and is so sheerly enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment. For Babitz, life was slow days, fast company until a freak fire in the 90s turned her into a recluse, living in a condo in West Hollywood, where Lili Anolik tracked her down in 2012. Anolik’s elegant and provocative new book is equal parts biography and detective story. It is also on dangerously intimate terms with its subject: artist, writer, muse, and one-woman zeitgeist, Eve Babitz.

Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.

Hollywood's Eve

Didion and Babitz

Didion & Babitz 

Lili Peloquin

"Murder and glamour set in the ambiguous and claustrophobic world of an exclusive New England prep school"--

Dark Rooms

Eva González

Habitaciones oscuras

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Air Mail, Harper’s Bazaar, The Washington Post, and more! Joan Didion is revealed at last in this “vivid, engrossing” (Vogue), and outrageously provocative dual biography “that reads like a propulsive novel” (Oprah Daily) revealing the mutual attractions—and antagonisms—of Didion and her fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz. Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? —Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972 Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin, and filth of her apartment, a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside, a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies and centered on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood. 7406 Franklin Avenue, a combination salon-hotbed-living end where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock ‘n’ rollers, and drug trash. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion, a mystery behind her dark glasses and cool expression; an enigma inside her storied marriage to John Gregory Dunne, their union as tortured as it was enduring. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the breaking and then the remaking—and thus the true making—of another great American writer: Eve Babitz, goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky, nude of Marcel Duchamp, consort of Jim Morrison (among many, many others), a woman who burned so hot she finally almost burned herself alive. Didion and Babitz formed a complicated alliance, a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity. Didion, in spite of her confessional style, is so little known or understood. She’s remained opaque, elusive. Until now. With deftness and skill, journalist Lili Anolik uses Babitz, Babitz’s brilliance of observation, Babitz’s incisive intelligence, and, most of all, Babitz’s diary-like letters—letters found in those sealed boxes, letters so intimate you don’t read them so much as breathe them—as the key to unlocking Didion. And “what the book makes clear is that Didion and Babitz were more alike than either would have liked to admit” (Time).

Claire Douglas

Koren Zailckas

Shocking, compelling and unputdownable – 3 psychological thrillers that will leave you sleeping with the light on...

The Grip Lit Collection: The Sisters, Mother, Mother and Dark Rooms

Nica Baker, bella, misteriosa e spregiudicata, muore assassinata a soli sedici anni. La placida e ricca città del New England in cui vive con la famiglia precipita nell’angoscia. Quando viene ritrovato un altro giovane corpo senza vita (questa volta un ragazzo, con ogni evidenza morto suicida), il doppio caso viene archiviato precipitosamente. Per la polizia non ci sono dubbi: è il compagno di classe di Nica, innamorato respinto, il responsabile dell’omicidio della ragazza, e il biglietto trovato sul cadavere rappresenta una confessione in piena regola. Ma Grace, sorella minore della vittima, non sa darsi pace. Incalzata dai ricordi e dall’istinto, si rifiuta di accettare la versione ufficiale. In preda a quella che diventa un’ossessione bruciante, scava nel passato recente di Nica per inchiodare il vero assassino. Mentre la lista dei possibili indiziati si allunga, vengono a galla insospettabili verità: su Nica, sulla madre, sull’intera famiglia Baker. Solo attraversando la notte che ha nel cuore, Grace potrà ricostruire cosa è accaduto alla sorella – e diventare finalmente se stessa. “Una storia avvincente, colpi di scena formidabili e una spiazzante conoscenza dei meandri dell’animo umano. Un debutto davvero notevole.” - MICHAEL CONNELLY “Elettrico, devastante e impossibile da posare.” - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY “Sono la forza dei personaggi e l’asciuttezza della scrittura a rendere l’insieme tanto potente.” - KIRKUS REVIEWS

Lili Anolik

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