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Kevin Brazil
Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Art Review, art-agenda, Studio International, and elsewhere. He is writing a book about queer happiness.

Articles Available Online


Interview with Sianne Ngai

Interview

October 2020

Kevin Brazil

Interview

October 2020

Over the past fifteen years, Sianne Ngai has created a taxonomy of the aesthetic features of contemporary capitalism: the emotions it provokes, the judgements...

Essay

Issue No. 28

Fear of a Gay Planet

Kevin Brazil

Essay

Issue No. 28

In Robert Ferro’s 1988 novel Second Son, Mark Valerian suffers from an unnamed illness afflicting gay men, spread by...

I disowned my real pain & engaged with its subordinates:   despicable neediness, heroic guilt and undeterrable envy Each day I woke trussed up with this hernia of failure, bleat bleat There was inevitable blood; I slept on a pyre of bottles Stalked by motherhood, unable to summon my latent powers Leaves blew into the hallway and did their ageing there, the eager wind fussed with them like the beaded fringe of a shawl at war with itself Powerful identification with the leaves In the garden, splendour made its entrance while I wasn’t looking I was quaking all this time, my whole body a throat stoppered by tears I tried to will dreams of romantic redemption, but my brain swatted them away, like flies gunning for something you really want to eat     No one should be frightened of pleats (Coco Chanel)   My life has been merely a prolonged childhood Bored, with a squalid boredness that idleness and riches bring about (I would make a very bad dead person) Money is not attractive, it’s convenient The only thing I really like spending is my strength Every time I’ve done something reasonable, it’s brought me bad luck: that sweet smile of gratitude, tinged with a longing to kill me I am ready to start all over again The first people to whom I opened my heart were the dead I hate people touching me, rather as cats do I merely observe that I have grown up, lived, and am growing old alone I loathe people putting order into my disorder Let them skip the pages Sometimes I lose myself in the maze of my legendary fame What an abomination, a ghastly disease! That handsome parasite that is the imagination, lapped up in secret, in the so-called attic I imposed black; it’s still going strong today I don’t have to explain my creations; they have explained themselves I knew how to express my times I used to tolerate colour Changing one’s mind appalls me Do you see what a foul temper I have? I cannot take orders from anyone, except in love, madly, with a man who loathes me Everything is lovely and empty I only care for trivial things, else nothing at all If I built aeroplanes, I would begin by making one that was

Contributor

March 2018

Kevin Brazil

Contributor

March 2018

Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London...

Interview with Terre Thaemlitz

Interview

March 2018

Kevin Brazil

Interview

March 2018

In the first room of Terre Thaemlitz’s 2017 exhibition ‘INTERSTICES’, at Auto Italia in London, columns of white text ran across one wall. Thaemlitz...

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poetry

April 2014

Lives of the Saints

Luke Neima

poetry

April 2014

‘I’m tending to this dead tree,’ he tells me. Last time he was rolling the hard rocks down into...

Interview

March 2017

Interview with Rodrigo Hasbún

Enea Zaramella

Rodrigo Hasbún

TR. Sophie Hughes

Interview

March 2017

Rodrigo Hasbún (born Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1981) has published two novels and a collection of short stories; he was selected...

fiction

July 2015

Agata's Machine

Camilla Grudova

fiction

July 2015

Agata and I were both eleven years old when she first introduced me to her machine. We were in...

 

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