Description

It is the 1970s in LA, and Jacaranda Leven – child of sun and surf – is swept into the dazzling cultural milieu of the beautiful people. Floating on a cloud of drink, drugs and men, she finds herself adrift, before her talent for writing, and a determined literary agent, set her on a course for New York and a new life.

Sex & Rage is a recently re-discovered classic from author Eve Babitz, herself a muse to many an artist, writer and musician in the 1970s. A semi-autobiographical novel, it charts the highs and lows of a life lived at the limits, and transports the reader to a sunnier, dreamier, more reckless time and place.

Publisher Review

As cool, sharp and delicious as a perfectly executed Mint Julep. Babitz writes with wit and clarity - and always, always with a whole lot of heart -- ELIZABETH DAY Babitz writes like no one else, but if she sounds like anyone, it is Nora Ephron writing songs for Lana del Rey. Sex & Rage is seductive, funny and infuriating - it's a slacker siren song, a novel about writers and writing and a heavenly holiday to '70s LA all at once -- DAISY BUCHANAN Pure pleasure - a perpetual-motion machine of no-stakes elation and champagne fizz * * New Yorker * * Babitz's style is cool, conversational, loose, yet weighted with a seemingly effortless poetry * * Guardian * * Gritty, glamorous, toxic and intoxicating * * The New York Times * * Babitz's talent is in the telling. She surfs between prose and poetry, describing tenderness and cruelty with equally weighted vividness, and lacerates with her wit. Even though the book is forty years old, the title is more resonant than ever . . . Jacaranda's greatest dilemmas feel painfully contemporary * * Independent * * Eve Babitz is to prose what Chet Baker, with his light, airy style, lyrical but also rhythmic, detached but also sensuous, is to jazz * * Vanity Fair * * A beautiful stylist . . . The joy of Babitz's writing is in her ability to suggest that an experience is very nearly out of language while still articulating its force within it * * New Republic * * The portrait of the artist as an ever-evolving young woman * * W * *