READING IS FUNDAMENTAL

After it was published in the New

Yorker in 2017, Kristen Roupenian’s short story ‘Cat Person’ – exploring an awful date and short-lived relationship with a grown man “shockingly bad” at kissing – quickly became the must-read piece of the moment. The writer’s new collection of essays, You Know You

Want This (Penguin, $35), is set to be equally well-received; one of the most anticipated books of 2019, it showcases Kristen’s skill at capturing the minutiae of dating, sex and modern womanhood.

Their groovy typographic covers have turned Eve Babitz’s books into Instabait, and now she’s receiving her own deserved history. The author was known as one of the free-spirited creatives of the heady LA scene in the ’60s and ’70s (she was the naked woman playing chess with artist Marcel Duchamp in that iconic 1963 photo, and had romances with big names including Jim Morrison, Steve Martin and artist Ed Ruscha), and wrote loosely about her experiences in novels including Black Swans and Sex and Rage: Advice to Young Ladies Eager

for a Good Time. Eve’s work saw a revival following a Vanity Fair profile in 2014, and now the writer of that piece, Lili Anolik, takes a deeper look at her fascinating life in new must-read Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the

Secret History of LA (Scribner, $39).