Influx Press signs Brazil's Queer Happiness

Influx Press has signed Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness?, a book mixing essays, biography and autobiography by Kevin Brazil.

Editor Kit Caless acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Harriet Moore at David Higham Associates, due for release in September 2022 as a paperback and e-book.

Caless said he was “enthralled with Brazil’s incisive and inspirational take on the representations of queer culture in art and literature, and his push to centre happiness and joy back into queer cultural production”.

He said: “When I read Kevin’s proposal and completed essays, I thought, here is someone saying something we can all learn and gain inspiration from. Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness? is a beautifully written and realised work that will provoke, stimulate and disrupt the discourse on art and culture in the UK. Iconoclastic and unafraid, Brazil will become a force to be reckoned with. It’s a perfect Influx book, confrontational and challenging, yet accessible and with a kind, loving heart at the centre.”

Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic whose writing has appeared in Granta, the White Review, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Art Review, art-agenda and Studio International among others.

He said: “I’ve been thinking about the relationship between desire and happiness for a couple of years now, and I still don’t have any answers. I am so grateful to Kit Caless and all the team at Influx Press for giving me the opportunity to keep exploring these questions in a book of essays that I hope will draw on the best the essay offers as a genre: the space to inquire, explore, experiment and speculate; to weave connections between disparate people and places; to write about the self by means of loving attention to those attachments and relationships that make up who we really are.”