Eve Babitz doesn’t have a computer, and if you phone her, she is likely to hang up on you. Since the afternoon nearly two decades ago when she dropped a lighted match on her lap while driving home from lunch in her ’68 VW Bug, she has kept mostly to herself, holed up in her West Hollywood apartment with her cat and seeing select visitors. Now 76, Ms. Babitz is dimly aware of her surging popularity, particularly among young women, but aging hits burn victims even harder than it does the rest of us, and lately she has turned more inward. “All publicity is great,” she has told her sister, Mirandi Babitz, as Mirandi recalled recently, “but not really in your 70s.”

No matter: next month New York Review Book Classics, a.k.a the thinking person’s book series that also looks great on Instagram, will publish a collection of her magazine articles. “I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz” is the publisher’s third title exhuming the work of a voluptuous voluptuary with fizzy prose who once announced to her mother that “adventuress” might be her career choice .

Along with the chillier and more established Joan Didion, Ms. Babitz was a woman sending dispatches from the front lines of 70s era West Coast bohemia, gently satirizing the incestuous music and art worlds of Los Angeles. But she seemed to be having lot more fun than Ms. Didion: she wasn’t just at the party; more often than not, it seemed, she was the party itself.

Image “I feel about Eve the way Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg feel about World War II,” said a television and film producer who optioned four of her books. “I can’t get enough.”

Ms. Babitz wasn’t famous, exactly, but she was always known: for being Hollywood royalty (she was Igor Stravinsky’s goddaughter); for her love life (a partial list of Ms. Babitz’s paramours includes Jim Morrison, Harrison Ford, Steve Martin, Annie Leibovitz and Walter Hopps, the influential — and married — curator who was a founder of the then-rollicking Ferus gallery in Los Angeles); for her physique (Rubensesque in a land of Twiggys); and for “that photo” (of a nude 19-year-old Ms. Babitz playing chess with Marcel Duchamp, a photographic stunt Ms. Babitz agreed to in order to irritate Mr. Hopps, which subsequently became so ubiquitous that it even showed up, Ms. Babitz once said , on a poster for the Museum of Modern Art).