"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."
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.
A. V. Marraccini is a critic, essayist, and historian of art. She lives in London.
