EVE’S HOLLYWOOD

By Eve Babitz

296 pages. New York Review Books. $17.95.

I have a well-read friend, a former used-book dealer in New Orleans, who is of the opinion that the person with the best literary taste in America is Edwin Frank, the editor of New York Review Books Classics. I’m in no position to argue.

Since 1999, Frank’s imprint has reissued hundreds of out-of-print books, many of them foreign-language volumes in their first American translations. There’s been nary a misfire in the bunch. Several of these handpicked books, including John Williams’s novel “Stoner,” originally published in 1965, have become not just critical but commercial successes.

The books are beautifully designed, as distinctive in their way as are Penguin Classics. Merely holding one to your forehead raises your I.Q. by a standard deviation.

I have Frank to thank for introducing me, through his series, to a writer who’s given a steep amount of pleasure over the past year. That writer is the Los Angeles-born glamour girl, bohemian, artist, muse, sensualist, wit and pioneering foodie Eve Babitz, whose prose reads like Nora Ephron’s by way of Joan Didion, albeit with more lust and drugs and tequila.