Sex & Rage: Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time

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.

Reviews of Sex & Rage: Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time

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 * * 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 * *