'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.' Maggie Nelson 'I read this book with amazement, with writerly envy, with real and deepening wonder . . . The essays become a complex and deeply moving inventory of the self, unlike anything else I've read.' Garth Greenwell 'Proxies 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 . . . Interrogative, unsettling, and brilliant.' Claudia Rankine 'Everyone ought to read Brian Blanchfield's Proxies immediately . . . an astounding sequence of essays [that] raises extraordinary issues of trauma and memory and time, while arousing provocative ideas about our relationship to the "automatic knowledge" provided by the Internet and what it might mean to turn away from the screen. It will change you.' Jonathan Lethem