A.V. MARRACCINI is a critic, essayist, and art historian. Her work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), BOMB Magazine, Firmament, Hyperallergic and elsewhere. She was selected to the 2021-2022 class of National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Emerging Critics fellows. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago (2018) in the History of Art, and her BA from Yale University in History. She was a researcher with the Bilderfahrzeuge Project based at the Warburg Institute, School for Advanced Studies, University of London. She is currently based in New York City as the Critic in Residence and Adjunct Professor at the Integrated Design and Media Program at NYU Tandon. She tweets @saintsoftness and writes widely across transhistorical theory and criticism, from the baroque and classical to hyper-contemporary digital art..

Her first book, We the Parasites, is a lyrical essay about the nature of criticism as queer desire. 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. We the Parasites published 21 February 2023 in North America with Sublunary Editions and in the U.K. with Boiler House Press for their prestigious Beyond Criticism series in Autumn 2023, as announced in The Bookseller

Simon Palfrey, BCEditions editor, Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, said: "Marraccini's is a singular, candid, often startling new critical voice. She is as much a deprecating fury as a spright-like intellectual gadfly, fiercely intelligent, vulnerable but also implacable. For Marraccini intense critical reading is and should be parasitical: parasites keep the host as well as themselves alive; they are generative, they get right inside the object of their desire and their love. We the Parasites is an exercise in truth-seeking that makes the very idea of dispassionate criticism feel like existential failure. Marraccini brings everything she touches alive."

Read excerpt published in LitHub

Read excerpt and conversation with A.V. Marraccini and artist Isabella Streffen in @MinorLits

REVIEWS:

"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

"☝️What he said." Boris Dralyuk

"A.V. Marraccini's book is generative, creative, fruitful, a hybrid that points to something beyond the lyric essay. It is stuffed with art and poetry and life; it is erudite and frequently fun…in the spirit of works by authors like W.G. Sebald, Claudia Rankine, Ben Lerner, and Maggie Nelson." Biblioklept.org

"Criticism is reconfigured by Marraccini as a mutual process of creation, one that proves to be both fruitful and self-destructive, a living, evolving collaboration." Eliza Browning, Full Stop (review paired with I by Brian Dillon)

Also in Full Stop interview with Lindsay Lerman who describes We The Parasites as "a bodily, cerebral, and unabashedly horny book. An experiment in subjectivity and a love letter to art and theory."

Beyond the Zero podcast

ARTICLES:

Outland Variations on the Future

Hyperallergic Marina Abramovic, Mobs and the Cult of the Hero

Hyperallergic Waiting for the Drop: Crypto Art and Speed

BOMB Magazine (Issue 156, June 2021): Duvet Theories (an experimental piece on softness, bedding, certainty, Fra Angelico, and Caravaggio)

Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB): Mordew and The New Leftist Imaginary (on Alex Pheby's Mordew and the political implications of British spec fic and fantasy in America)

Avidly: Twenty-Five Thoughts On The Method Wars

Firmament, a regular column on 'Object Crushes' in Sublunary Editions new quarterly magazine

Dirt: I'm a Sims interior decorator

Dirt: Only knitters left alive

Review31: Give Me Difficulty, a review/critique of the British Museum's Nero exhibition

Dilettante Army: Lend Me Your Geometries (on Christopher Wren, Restoration London, city planning, fires, Riemann curvatures, the persistence of history, Japanese Metabolist architecture, Agnes Martin, grids, and other things)

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