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FEBRUARY 23, 2023
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Published in the UK from Boiler House/Beyond Criticism November 30, 2023.
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But I’m not the fig, I’m the wasp. I burrow into sweet, dark places of fecundity, into novels and paintings and poems and architectures, and I make them my own...
“We the Parasites is a treatise on what might be called “embodied criticism” – criticism written with desire. It fits in a tradition that stretches from Johann Winckelmann’s sexualized aesthetics to Susan Sontag’s “erotics of interpretation”: a tradition that includes Donna Tartt’s lethal neoclassicism in The Secret History and A. S. Byatt’s equation of study and seduction in Possession…Marraccini’s sparkling writing traces that spectrum, moving from the grubbily self-deprecating to the exaltingly authoritative.” — TLS review by Sophie Oliver
"We the Parasites is my new favorite book, a dazzlingly erudite disquisition on the erotics of criticism, riven with knockout sentences and a luxuriant sensibility. A. V. Marraccini stops you in your tracks, urges you to think with her a while about the delicous joy of art, how we grow huge and terrifying on it, and how this thievery, this parasitism is necessary both for its continuance and for our own." —Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City
"In 1964, Sontag wrote: 'In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.' Since then, many works of criticism have paid lip service to this desideratum, but few have managed to achieve it. […] In We the Parasites, encountering a work of art is not fixed as a safe looking at, but rather as an eating, a kissing, a being-seduced-by, a being-contaminated by, a being-infected-by that restores art and criticism to the dangerous adventure that it is." — Ryan Ruby
Intertwining fig wasps, Updike, Genet, Twombly, Rilke, jewel heists, and a vividly rendered panoply of histories and myths from classical antiquity, it both tells a strange love story and makes a slantwise argument about reading with the body. We The Parasites reconfigures how longing changes and informs our relationship with art and literature, and asks what it means to want.
Press for We The Parasites:
Review in the Times Literary Supplement by Sophie Oliver (unpaywalled photo of TLS review here)
2023 End of the Year Lists:
- TZUM/Netherlands Review of Books, Books of the Year 2023 (chosen by editor Kirstof Smeyers)
- Ryan Ruby (The Millions—a year in reading, 2023 Lists)
- Dan Sinykin (The Millions—a year in reading, 2023 Lists)
- Bookshop.org (Stu Hennigan, Best Reads of 2023)
- Ancillary Review (2023 Notable Books)
- Tobias Carroll, Ten Best Books of 2023 (for Inside Hook)
Review in The Brooklyn Rail, by Chris Campanioni
Review in Full Stop alongside Brian Dillon’s Affinities, by Eliza Browning
Review in the New York Review of Architecture by Kate Wagner
Interview in Full Stop with Lindsey Lerman
Excerpt on LitHub
Excerpt on Minor Lits
Conversation on Minor Lits with Isabella Streffen
Biblioklept, review
Zoe Tuck, Substack review
Joseph Schreiber, Substack review
Nuvo Magazine, Spring Must Reads
Beyond the Zero, podcast appearance
Used prominently in this May December film review on LitHub By Hannah Bonner