Description
Book SynopsisPast compunction, expressly unbeholden, these twenty-four single-subject essays train focus 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, subject positions in American labor (not excluding academia), and his upbringing in working-class, Primitive Baptist, central-piedmont North Carolina.
Trade Review2016 Whiting Award in Nonfiction
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Memoir
Finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award in Nonfiction
“A collection of idiosyncratic, candid, devastating essays…it’s 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 posthaste.”—Garth Greenwell, The Guardian
“The quiet but searing vulnerability in Brian Blanchfield’s writing is as wide and trembling as the wingspan of his otherness. He writes with a beguiling sagaciousness that made me bow my head so many times that I lost count. These are essays about honesty and the revelation of self in which shame and guilt are dissected and anything extraneous scrubbed away. Each sentence is a live wire. Diverse, maybe mismatched styles, genres and topics accrue to great and moving effect, a profound whole made from an unlikely assemblage of parts. He appears to be forging a new genre before your very eyes.”—2016 Whiting Award Judges’ Citation
“Proxies: Essays Near Knowing brings a slowed-to-meaning lens to the remembered moments of a life. Blanchfield’s readers wander into his ordinary-extraordinary quotidian―the vulnerable longing of a singular voice expressing a peopled intelligence. Not since Hilton Als’ White Girls have I read anything as interrogative, unsettling, and brilliant.”—Claudia Rankine
“Into what some are calling a new golden age of creative nonfiction lands Brian Blanchfield’s PROXIES, which singlehandedly raises the bar for what’s possible in the field. This is a momentous work informed by a lifetime of thinking, reading, loving, and reckoning, utterly matchless in its erudition, its precision, its range, its daring, and its grace. I know of no book like it, nor any recent book as thoroughly good, in art or in heart.”—Maggie Nelson
