LIBRA:
Eve, Kate, Slow Days, Fast Company, Foam
What makes a Kate Zambreno book is similar to what brings us back to Eve Babitz decade after decade—allure.
Allure - the powerful quality of being attractive or charming - is one of the main delineations for Venus, the ruler of our current astrological season: Libra.
Venus: adorned, desirable, operates from pleasure, while questioning what pleasure actually is. Is pleasure soft, stark, smooth, shiny, salacious, slippery, surreal, shattering?
Venus, and Libra, believe every lens for pleasure is necessary and justifiable. Libra emphasizes partnership and aesthetic while Venus teaches us our relationship to care and our personal values. Romance comes in all forms of sensation.
Eve Babitz and Kate Zambreno are both writing from counter-cultured margins about aesthetics and the experience of the body. With these two books, we are asked to question where necessity and desire come from, who deserves it, what it looks like, where it echoes, and how can our cravings and comforts be pushed from the interior space to the external. They capture nuances of the human condition through perspectives on landscape, texture, inspiration.
In Slow Days, Fast Company (1977), romance is found in the cinema of Southern California, Hollywood inner circles, and the great Santa Ana Winds.
In Foam (2026), Zambreno feels through her own experiences by navigating major and minor moments of daily life with inspiration from the sculptural works of Eva Hesse and other textures.
Through their perspectives and reflections, we learn things only the sun orbiting in Libra could unveil.
Kate Zambreno is the author of many acclaimed books including Drifts, To Write As If Already Dead, and Heroines. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, The White Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction, she teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and is the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College.
Eve Babitz (1943–2021) was the author of several books of fiction, including Sex and Rage: Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time, L.A. Woman, and Black Swans: Stories. Her nonfiction works include Fiorucci, the Book and Two by Two: Tango, Two-Step, and the L.A. Night. She has written for a variety of publications including Ms. and Esquire and in the late 1960s designed album covers for the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Linda Ronstadt.