A. V. Marraccini We the Parasites

Annotation

In her debut book, A. V. Marraccini explores how we inhabit works of art, and how our sense of longing informs and changes our relationship to them. Intertwining fig wasps, Updike, Genet, Twombly, Rilke, jewel heists, and a vividly rendered panoply of histories and myths from classical antiquity, We the Parasites both tells a strange love story and makes a slantwise argument about reading with the body, and what it ultimately means to know, and to want. ‘We the Parasites is my new favourite book, a dazzlingly erudite disquisition of 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 delicious 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.