Instagram story viewer> @readingbynight> Posts

Caterina Fake

@readingbynight

306

followers

424

following

Reading by night, sleeping by day. Sundance, McSweeneys, City Arts. Prev: cofounder Flickr, Chairman Etsy. Reader Writer Artist. Also at @cefake

POSTS STORIES REELS

Were that all criticism were written in the manner of this book! Or Eros the Bittersweet. Or any of the books by Eliot Weinberger. I had never read anything by Charles Olson before, but after reading this I have been scouring the shelves of a half a dozen bookstores in search of his poetry. No luck yet, and I will persist. But this one, which I read in one sitting and immediately flipped to the front to read it again, is about Moby Dick and Melville, Melville and Shakespeare, and how Melville made a mess of everything, from his white marriage, to “getting bunched up with Jesus”, but how, before unleashing these disasters, he managed to dispatch this great work from the ancient of days, the vastness of America, the Pacific, and space. He conjectures (alongside others) that there was one Moby Dick before he read Shakespeare and another after. Olson got into the Melville archives and excavated his marginalia to support his case, but whether or not it’s true doesn’t really matter because Olson created a great and visionary book, this book, about it. by @readingbynight

I was astonished and floored and impressed by this book the first time I read it and was so pleased to have discovered it. I became an instant Helen DeWitt fan. I immediately read all of her other books. Color me flummoxed that this read through, some years later, provided little excitement, no astonishment, and did not find me on the floor. Which lends credence to the theory that you can’t go home again, time changes a reader, and you can’t stick your foot in the same river twice. Fancy that. The book has not changed but I have. by @readingbynight

Some sentences leave me so dumbstruck and awed I have to read them five times. by @readingbynight

by @readingbynight

by @readingbynight

Since reading Three Strong Women three times I decided it was time to branch out and read more NDiaye. This was newly translated by Jordan Stump in 2026 but was written in 1996. I read this on the flight from Boulder to San Francisco. by @readingbynight

Sharon Blackie has excavated all the best Celtic myths relevant to women, retold lost stories where women were the stewards of the earth and had power and magic and respect. These are the myths we need now. by @readingbynight

Zoos and Kafka from @transitbooks by @readingbynight

I have always bought writers notebooks, journals, letters, diaries whenever I found them. Camus, Woolf, Nin…everyone’s. Sontag, Flaubert, Gombrowicz, Kafka, Rorem, Bourgeois, Dickinson. I like looking at the material used to make the magisterial. A lot of books these days are notebooks. Partial, tentative, rough. This book juxtaposed women’s writing from different eras and said their juxtaposition would create a kind of conversation. by @readingbynight

I love short books. But I love very short books even more. by @readingbynight

In this book, Lalwani describes the difficulties of Ray, a filmmaker struggling to make a documentary about a rural prison in India under the constant menace and threat of sexual violence. Hair-raising. by @readingbynight

This book has been my companion all day as I walked, took the subway, stood waiting on street corners. “ I had read that Aristotle and his students were called the Peripatetics because they studied that together as they walked and wondered about”. It was the subject of several synchronicities. I met a woman at Printed Matter who was standing and reading the same book . It appeared again on a slide my friend Lauren was giving during her talk at e-flux… and I found this passage about Aristotle within. by @readingbynight