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I was so excited for this collection of stories. Her previous collection was one of my all time favorites; weird, dark, twisted but fun, always unexpected. The book unfortunately was a major regression. Every story felt like it followed a trope I already knew. There were a few stories near the end of the collection that had that same feeling of surprise and innovation, but nothing like in Cursed Bunny. :(

I cannot overstate how much I loved this book. Babitz is such a sharp writer, and hilarious. She writes about the LA that the world imagines it to be, glamorous and sexy, hedonistic and privileged, and yet she imbues it all with an existential reflection that makes you realize just how frail and flawed and human all these people are. Their skin may glow in the golden sun, but the hard shadows cast from it create an abyss into which they cannot help but stare.

A really remarkable book. Haunting tale about how one little girl builds the narrative of her life through tragedy, and what it means when we are an unreliable narrator of our own inner monologue. Full of beautiful, strange, poetic moments driven by characters that still feel deeply human.

A lot of ideas crammed into a story about post AI apocalypse. Would have been better if some were left out. I liked some of the characters some of the time.

@christa Hah...yeah, my reaction to a lot of Verso books is usually "This book is actually a fantastic 5,000 word essay with 50,000 extra words sprinkled in"

The first story about...I guess I could summarize it as "zen, the demons of history, and the demolition derby"...is wild, and unexpected. Gonna have to re-read.