I’m back from the mountains! I need to catch up on posts, but in the meantime, I thought I’d share this photo that Drew just sent me. He went hiking today. #NYRBWomen25 💙

It’s time for my annual September retreat. I’ve arrived in the mountains for a long, solo weekend at a friend’s cabin. I’ll be offline for a few days relishing the peace & solitude, long walks & mindful rest. Have a wonderful weekend! 🍂🍁🍃🍂🍁

“How satisfactory, she thought, to be made thus, clear & unambiguous, and not as most people were, in a muddle of conflicting features & indeterminant results: with the eyes of a poet & the hands of a butcher, the frame of a prize-fighter & the lined brow, the spectacled eyes of a scholar.” (p127)

“The lake was girdled with trees and bushes, and wild song welled out as if from the throats of hundreds and hundreds of choral branches. The unfolding leaves covered the boughs […] some were tinged with a russet flame, haunting the eye with an autumnal prophecy.”🍁🍂 #ANote_2025

Now watching.

#NYRBWomen25 El Greco’s portraiture & Bruegel’s snowy landscapes make an appearance in one of Kavan’s stories today, AIRING A GRIEVANCE. “the curious balance of latent sensuality & dominant intellectualism seen to the best advantage in some of the work of El Greco.” (p12)

A very happy birthday to my kindred Virgo friends, @nichollsm86.bsky.social & @pear-jelly.bsky.social! 🍂🎂🥳 May the year ahead unfold in beautiful, joyous ways. xo

#NYRBWomen25 I got interrupted yesterday so I just finished listening to this episode & guess what @onebrightbook.bsky.social’s next book selection is!!!! 🎉 (Well done, @nonsuchbook.bsky.social!) I can’t wait to hear this discussion!

#NYRBWomen25 “It is useless for me to attempt to any further approach to people who are utterly inaccessible, utterly out of sympathy with me. Almost at my last gasp, I come to throw myself on their mercy, & a lecture is all they can find for me in their empty hearts.”(p6) This first story is so 💔.

Thank you @kjboldon.bsky.social @christina500.bsky.social @radzpandit.bsky.social @sparrowpost.bsky.social @motherslug.bsky.social @guslegend.bsky.social @caitluce.bsky.social @nichollsm86.bsky.social for braving Leonora’s surrealist world with me! What did you all think?

#NYRBWomen25 “Her portraits of ill-fated & marginalized outsiders recall Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles, even Carson McCullers, and her experiments with surrealism beg comparison with other surrealist women writers such as Leonora Carrington, Unica Zürn & Ithell Colquhoun.” (p xiv Intro)

Now listening!! ✨💫 open.spotify.com/episode/0Zf6...

Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione (1837-1899), Italian aristocrat & pioneering figure in the early history of photography #WomensArt

#NYRBWomen25 I finished THE STONE DOOR this morning & already want to reread, although I think I’d be equally lost in all the same parts, lol. I loved it though & Anna Watz’s Afterword is exceptional! Thank you, @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social for publishing this! 💛 We start Kavan’s stories on Thursday!

“She got up, feeling new life in her limbs. […] They had fed a spring inside her, the words had bubbled up from a source long dry.” (p90) #ANote_2025

I just poured myself a glass of red wine to read today’s pages because I feel like this may be the appropriate state in which to read this book. 🍷 Cheers! #NYRBWomen25

It is true, @sparrowpost.bsky.social! 💛 #AContinuation25

#NYRBWomen25 Celia Bell on THE STONE DOOR: “the novel is a cluttered bird’s nest, made up of various shiny bits of found material: fairy tale, Surrealist dream writing, occultist drivel, prophetic tome, bourgeois domestic novel.” lithub.com/escape-from-...

#NYRBWomen25 First American edition of THE STONE DOOR. www.abebooks.com/first-editio...

A new piece from Kate Briggs with translated excerpts of Bassette’s writing about ‘the Poetic Novel’ (& Barthes makes an appearance)!! #AContinuation25 (cc: @ofbooksandbikes.bsky.social)

“It is true that we grow older, as Clare said; we can mark the very day when we cease to suffer vain longing to torment us; and then the thorny companionship of youth is at an end.” (p77) #ANote_2025

“Bessette’s Lili is Crying poses as a vast and intimately rendered image, the landscape always lush, here stormy and charged with resentment, there tranquil. Like a painting, the novel is more situation, less story.” www.full-stop.net/2025/08/01/r...

Here are the books I brought home from our trip to San Francisco. 🚃✨ I found several used gems that were only $2-$4 (couldn’t pass up!) & a couple new books I’ve been excited about (Romano, Mendelson, Goodman, Belben, Colquhoun).

Zero surprise, but Drew & I bought some books in San Francisco! Thank you, @citylightsbooks.bsky.social @greenapplebooks.bsky.social Dog Eared Books & Russian Hill Bookstore. This is Drew’s stack.

“I was standing outside the British Museum […] As I waited, somewhat impatiently, I passed the time examining the big sculpture from Easter Island which guards the door like a dead sentry.” (p46) #NYRBWomen25 This morning’s rabbit hole w/interesting video. www.artoftheancestors.com/blog/rapa-nu...

“I have trained all the love in my body into energy, and all my hate, which is also a great force, I have trained into thought. My womb is no larger than a grain of rice because its powers have all been used in discovery.” #NYRBWomen25

I've no idea what Leonora Carrington was getting at here in The Stone Door, but it sure does evoke an arm of the sinister paranoia powering contemporary America. Ungodly in its bleakness: "Perhaps hate as well as love could reveal secrets.” #NYRBWomen25

I also spent some time with Agnes. 💛

Hey #NYRBWomen25 - Leonora & I spent some time together today at SFMOMA! 🦚

#ANote_2025 “She quickened her pace : she was almost running, a thing she hated. ‘But do I hate it?’ she wondered […] ambling downhill on matronly limbs, and rather enjoying herself.” (p39)

Drew & I are off to San Francisco for a long weekend to celebrate my birthday MONTH! 😉 Where should we go? What should we eat?

Increasingly convinced the main damage cell phones have done to creativity isn't decreased attention spans or what not but the elimination of productive boredom. Inspiration comes from the mind filling the void inside. Hard to make art when you're constantly silencing the silence with "content."

A Top Ten from Kate Zambreno! www.artforum.com/lists/kate-z...

I am co-leading a year-long Man Without Qualities Reading Group with @samantharhill.bsky.social , starting on Monday, October 13th. Join us! Details can be found here: genesegrill.substack.com/p/man-withou...

We saw the ‘Anila Quayyum Agha: Geometry of Light’ exhibit at the Seattle Asian Art Museum today & it was stunning!

“If we ignore the door of the womb we shall shrivel and die.” #NYRBWomen25

“Leonora’s family, myself included, usually ate meals in the kitchen. Here Leonora invented strange dishes for friends as well.” (from the Intro by Gabriel Weisz Carrington) #NYRBWomen25 I would love to visit her house. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

#ANote_2025 “Contentment came in a warm sluggish tide of well-being when Annie drew the curtains, heaped the fire, and left her with a great cup of coffee and a toasted bun, and a new novel from the library” (p7) 🔥☕️📚

Highly recommend CHESS OF THE WIND on the Criterion Channel, a 1976 Iranian film written & directed by Mohammad Reza Aslani.

“Let’s​ start with her life, which is as operatically strange as the fiction. Susan Taubes was born Judit Zsuzánna Feldmann in Budapest in 1928. Her father was one of Freud’s disciples…” #NYRBWomen25 www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

“Mariana loved words. Words were her only means of getting hold of things[…]objects were turned away from her until she named them[…]they came to her like animals. Sometimes she fed them. Sometimes they offered themselves to her as food. Sometimes they sat on her heart & devoured her.” #NYRBWomen25

I missed #LetterboxdFriday last week & it’s been a good couple weeks. Akerman, Varda, Larisa Shepitko, Maya Deren, Lina Rodriguez. Also, MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA.

#NYRBWomen25 !!!

#NYRBWomen25 Currently reading the short story ‘Debriefing’ by Susan Sontag about Susan Taubes.

I’ve had several video calls this week with book friends met thru twitter & I could not be more grateful for this intelligent, open-hearted, curious community. 💛

#NYRBWomen25 LAMENT FOR JULIA wraps up in a couple days & then we begin THE STONE DOOR by Leonora Carrington on September 1!!!! I’m so excited to read this one! ✨

“The journeys we make during the reading of a book trace out, in some way, the private spaces we inhabit. There are texts that will always be our dead-end streets; fragments that will be bridges; words that will be like the scaffolding that protects fragile constructions. (1/2)

It has a cover! March 17, 2026! @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social #NYRBWomen26 www.nyrb.com/products/cra...

Anne Carson performs ‘Stacks’ with Danez Smith & Robert Currie.💛 youtu.be/SLXyQgRhRfY?...

The new season of The Critic and her Publics podcast is on translation and the first episode is a conversation on translating a sentence from Proust! #AContinuation25 @joiedevivre9.bsky.social podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...