Synopsis
'A rich and compelling personal account.' Financial Times
In this memoir in twenty-four essays, Blanchfield focuses on a startling miscellany of topics – Foot Washing, Dossiers, Br’er Rabbit, Housesitting, Man Roulette, the Locus Amoenus – that begin to unpack the essayist himself and his life’s rotating concerns: sex and sexuality, poetry and poetics, and his upbringing in working-class, Primitive Baptist, North...
Details
24 August 2017192 pages
9781509847853Imprint: Picador
Reviews
A rich and compelling personal account.Financial Times
Blanchfield produces a string of exhilarating passages . . . His observations and interrogations urge us to contemplate, very carefully, the happenings that surround us. “Why is a still thing upsetting?” he asks on the first page of the first Proxies essay, “On Owls”. The simplicity of the question disguises its profundity, which eventually crept up on me as I was nearing the end of the book. It still hasn’t let me go, and nor has the book.TLS
The most brilliant book I’ve read in years. Anyone who has been amazed (and rightly so) by Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts should read this book post-haste.Garth Greenwell, Guardian
Everyone ought to read Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies immediately . . . It will change youJonathan Lethem, BOMB
