Black Swans: Stories

Product Information

was sent from his native Holland to Australia to look for survivors of a ship thought to have been wrecked on the continent’s west coast. As a young girl growing up in Los Angeles, I spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure out who I was. If we followed a character that went about his or her daily business without a deflection of any kind we wouldn’t muster much narrative tension or impetus but when we lift that character out of certainty, introduce a glitch, a challenge to the status quo, then we assert enough pressure on them to reveal something insightful to the reader. In 1997, Babitz was severely injured when ash from a cigar she was smoking ignited her skirt, causing life-threatening third-degree burns over half her body.

It is like driving a collectible convertible with the top down and nary a care about breathing in the smog — though the smog is very real and quite pertinent. A new reissue of Babitz's collection of nine stories that look back on the 1980s and early 1990s-decades of dreams, drink, and glimpses of a changing world. There are tinges of sadness throughout the stories, of introspection but also hints of realisation, of moments to be proud of and people she is thankful were in her life, however briefly.Babitzs talent for the brilliant line, honed to a point, never interferes with her feel for languid pleasures.

The book's warmth radiates from her wit and charm, as well as moments when young women recognize and affirm each other. From the relative privilege of retrospection, we can work out the reason why wars start, why empires collapse, why economies crash. Witty, brilliant, self-effacing and profound all at once, it makes you want to track down her agent and beg for another book.The lack of a partner does not assume solitude, but Babitz links much of her ennui to the delicate tightrope walk of pleasing the moody, demanding men on whom she sets her sights. In “Free Tibet,” arguably the most moving story in the collection, Babitz plumbs the depths of her own self-absorption. A new reissue of Babitz’s collection of nine stories that look back on the 1980s and early 1990s—decades of dreams, drink, and glimpses of a changing world. Didion’s Los Angeles is filled with pestilence — freeways that inspire nervous breakdowns, raging fires, the moan of the Santa Anas setting everyone on murderous edge — whereas Babitz presents a lush, playful landscape full of movie stars and intellectual European émigrés, a city where the party never seems to end.

And what really is shocking about it all, too, the men who committed incest on their own daughters told a lot of them “You’re so fat, no wonder nobody will ever love you.

The fictional Eve looks back on her actions, of the drug use, of getting clean, of sexual freedom and past relationships, assessing where she is at certain points in her life. One of the strengths of this collection lies in her willingness to catalog her own flaws, even when exposing unflattering facets of her personality .