Our Blog

I manage to keep up to date with all the latest happenings about 50+ year old literary scandals and the gossip of said demi monde with a retinue of literary newsletters, including but not currently limited to: Lit Hub (oh how I covet their unpurchasable Joan Didion tote!), The Paris Review, TLS, and NYRB (though i was very mad at them for publishing the article revealing the identity of Elena Ferrante!). 

xo Leigh

Current mania for dresses paired with sneakers as evidenced by: myself, my small daughter, and I believe Titania pictured here, were she to hike up her party dress to show you her kicks.

xo Leigh

A sketch by Oliver Messel for Tyrone Guthrie’s 1937 production of A Midsummer night’s Dream at the old Vic via World of Interiors 

For late summer, we suggest a slip with a slip.

xo Leigh 

Summer take me I'm yours 

(though i will say the same to fall and winter and spring too - i'm profligate in my season love)

xo Leigh

via La Grotta Ices Instagram

We are not yet in the stretch of summer where the cool dark of a corpse by the side of a pond laden with lily pads feels like the right place to be, but we are always in the days of dresses in colors like cold scoops of ice cream sidled up next to black as night, white as a lamb shifts.

-Leigh

La Rose de Malmaison by Jean-Louis Victor Viger du Vigneau via Pleasure Garden

Learning about swans today for so many new swan things, and my favorite bit thus far: swans are notoriously messy nest builders.

xo Leigh

I can't stop listening to Maira Kalman interviews. How does that relate to Pierre, by Elizabeth Peyton? New York? Observing? Maira's mother never asked why, or what, they thought of art. Just look, she said!

xo Leigh

ps another favorite New York Pierre 

Now and then, I spend time thinking about how to turn more of life into the feeling of a long day reading at the beach. Placid, sun-baked, mind coursing with the syncopation of a perfect sentence, or paragraph, the horizon wobbling against the sea.

Pictured here: another sort of day to imagine, birds and bugs warbling, and frogs belching under lily pads.

xo Leigh

photo by Yelena Yemchuk

A few weeks ago, I took some days to prowl around the spas and cafes of Manhattan alone, with a book in hand, and on phone. I sat in The Odeon reading Willa Cather, amongst the newly marrieds who seem to plentifully lunch there after a civil ceremony at City Hall, and drank half a glass of white wine and thought about the last piece that Truman Capote wrote as a birthday gift to his best friend Joanne Carson, on a chance encounter with Willa Cather outside the New York Society Library, and the walk that the boy from the south and the writer from the plains took together, in the great swirling city hushed by snow.

xo Leigh

Willa Cather by Nicolai Fechin