Book Launch: Lovebug by Daisy Lafarge

Join Peninsula Press and the think big, read library at SET Social for the launch of Lovebug by Daisy Lafarge: readings by Francis Jones, Holly Pester and Nisha Ramayya. Music by Han (Boosterhooch).

Free to attend, RSVP here

Lovebug 
The pathogen arrives anyway and takes a seat at the table. Conditioned to welcome damage, I am curious about this uninvited guest. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat.

In Lovebug, Daisy Lafarge explores metaphors of love and disease as she seeks to understand human vulnerability and our intimacy with microbial life.

Turning to microbiology, mysticism, and psychoanalysis – as well as the raw materials of love and life – Lafarge navigates the uncomfortable intimacy between the human body and the many bacteria, viruses, and parasites to which it is host.

Lovebug is a book about the poetics of infection, and about how we can learn to live with multispecies ambivalence. How might we forge non-phobic relationships to our ‘little beasts’? How might we rewild our imaginations? In weaving the personal with the pathological, Lovebug complicates the idea of coherent selfhood, revealing life as a site of radical vulnerability and an ongoing negotiation with limit.

Readers:
Daisy Lafarge is a writer based in Glasgow, UK. Born in Hastings, she has lived in Scotland since 2011. She is the author of the novel Paul (Granta 2021; Riverhead 2022), which won a Betty Trask Award and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and the poetry collection Life Without Air (Granta 2020), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and awarded Scottish Poetry Book of the Year.  Lovebug (Peninsula 2023) is her latest work.

Francis Jones is a writer and artist from Ireland, living in London. Their pamphlet sacrificial fabric was published by SPAM in 2021. They wrote a short experimental film “I Thought I Hated U, Moon Snail” in collaboration with artist Jack Hogan for the final exhibition of the Whitney ISP, New York, which was also screened at the Colloquium Unpopular Culture at NYU in May 2023. They are currently working on an exhibition of writing, sound and illustration with Josie Perry, titled The Thieves – which is forthcoming at the Centre of Contemporary Arts, Glasgow in 2024.  

Holly Pester is based in Colchester. Publications include a collection of poetry, Comic Timing (2021, Granta), a radio play, Eclogues for Idle Workers (2019, BBC Radio 4 and Distance No Object), a record, Common Rest (2016, Prototype) and archive fanfiction, Go to reception and ask for Sara in red felt tip, (2015, Book Works). The Lodgers, a novel, is due out in February ’24 also with Granta. 

Nisha Ramayya grew up in Glasgow and now lives in London. Her poetry collection States of the Body Produced by Love (2019) is published by Ignota Books. Her second collection will be published by Granta in 2024. Tentatively called Now Let’s Take a Listening Walk, it hazards a musical journey through history, myth, and sci fi. 

DJ:
Han (Boosterhooch) is a DJ, producer, performer, sound designer, and healthcare worker based in Glasgow. She is a resident DJ at La Cheetah, runs Events Research Programme (a monthly subscription-based events series that focuses mostly on local experimental musicians), and edits radical healthcare magazine The Guts of It.