essayist + critic





FROM SUBLUNARY EDITIONS
FEBRUARY 23, 2023

ORDER HERE

REQUEST A GALLEY FOR REVIEW HERE
MAKE A DISTRIBUTION INQUIRY FOR A BOOKSHOP HERE

Forthcoming in the UK from Boiler House/Beyond Criticism November, 2023. 
PREORDER UK EDITION HERE
UK Acquisition Announcement In The Bookseller Here

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 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 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

Nuvo Magazine, Spring Must Reads

Beyond the Zero, podcast appearance