A.V. MARRACCINI is a critic, essayist, and historian of art. She is the Critic in Residence at the Department of Interdisciplinary Media, NYU Tandon. Her writing has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, Cleveland Review of Books, Artforum, BOMB, Hyperallergic, New York Review of Architecture, and for the Poetry Foundation. She was selected to the 2021-2022 class of National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Emerging Critics fellows. She was a fellow at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and then at the international Bilderfahrzeuge Project based at the Warburg Institute, University of London. She received her PhD in the History of Art from the University of Chicago (2018), following her MA (Toronto) and BA (Yale).

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.

She is currently based in Brooklyn, NYC and writing her second book, These New Fragilities, on the nature of lateness, art, and technology in an age of both extreme atrocity and beauty. It plays across influences as diverse as the French Rococo, Japanese postwar architecture, mid-twentieth century American abstract art, Said, Marlowe, Rilke, Montaigne and more to contend with living, both online and off, with hyper-rapidity, collapse, and ruin. These New Fragilities will be published in 2028 with Seven Stories Press.

We the Parasites has sold through five printings and is:

Finalist in Publishing Triangle Awards, Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

Best of the Year (2023) Lists:

The Millions, A Year in Reading: Ryan Ruby and Dan Sinykin

Bookshop.org, Best Reads of 2023, Stu Hennigan

Inside Hook, Tobias Carroll's 10 Best Books of 2023

Ancillary Review of Books, 2023 Notable Books

TZUM/Netherlands Review of Books, Books of the Year, chosen by editor Kirstof Smeyers

Read excerpt published in LitHub

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

REVIEWS:

"Quite simply the most intellectually stimulating reading experience, in any genre, I had this year. Part critical manifesto, part natural history, part sentimental education, We the Parasites represents a genuine breakthrough in our understanding of what criticism is and how it can be written, answering, at long last, Sontag's call for an "erotics of art." It is destined to become a classic and I will not stop talking about it until it does." Ryan Ruby, writer and critic, in The Millions

"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." Times Literary Supplement review by Sophie Oliver

"The best critical writing makes you rethink the very act of reading, watching or listening. That's the case with A. V. Marraccini's bravura collection We the Parasites, which abounds with rich metaphors and visceral imagery (the word "parasites" is in the title for a reason) alongside thought-provoking arguments about art and desire." Tobias Carroll in Inside Hook, 10 Best Books of 2023

"A gorgeous, necessary book of criticism—for criticism, about criticism…a full-bodied blend of memoir and manifesto…I've yet to read something so good at expressing the anguish and erotics of the critical practice." Jake Casella Brookins, Ancillary Review of Books, ARB's 2023 Notable Books

"Filled with gorgeous prose and heady ideas" NUVO, Must Read Books For Your Spring Reading List

"The most striking thing about A.V. Marraccini's new book on criticism is not that it is personal, or even intimate—it's that it is, against all odds, uncynical." review by Kate Wagner in New York Review of Architecture

"Marraccini's intellectual rigor, her tenacity and her ambivalence, occasion shades of Susan Sontag's incisive and indiscriminate "notebook-thinking…exhilarating…In Marraccini's probing examinations, in her relentless prolixity and receptiveness and her ambition to infect us, We the Parasites reconfigures reading as both ethics and erotics, asking whether the economy of literature and art isn't also a Necropolis, city of the abandoned and disappeared; asking whether it isn't readers, too, who have to descend, become something else—that third thing; neither subject nor object but parasite—in order to reanimate the dead." Chris Campanioni review, The Brooklyn Rail

"My god, what an excellent read! (Please excuse the abandonment of all the niceties of proper critical reviewing and even accept an errant exclamation mark, because this book is one that invites you into the critic's heart, mind and bed in a way that is completely, even joyously unexpected.) It is wise and funny and, best of all, it draws its references from the most unlikely places…Original and very entertaining..." roughghosts Substack review by Joseph Schreiber

"I put Marraccini on the side of the angels, and I am with her from wasps and fig to tapeworm and fish louse." Substack review by Zoe Tuck

"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." Simon Palfrey, BCEditions editor, Professor of English Literature at Oxford University

"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

ESSAYS:

Cleveland Review of Books American Returns, one of her most-read pieces with more than 60K views

Poetry Foundation, But there are other geometries, one of the Poetry Foundation's most-read pieces of 2024

Berlin Review Pure Paint, Dead in the Air

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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