Tunnel Vision

Kevin Breathnach

Tunnel Vision is a book unlike any other from ‘one of the most interesting writers working in Ireland today’ (Sally Rooney).

1 in stock

£12.99
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780571340088
Date Published
07.03.2019
Delivery
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Summary

A lethal cocktail of memoir and criticism.

A documentary through the speaker’s post-adolescent relationships.

An arrangement of time in Chemnitz, Bergen, Dublin, Paris, Gwangju, Munich and Madrid.

An intimate portrayal of unstable masculinity and sexual repression.


A study in artifice, honesty, faith and the image.

An autobiography of a compulsive liar.

Brave, wild, and genre-bending, Tunnel Vision launches one of the finest new essayists around.

Critic Reviews

The answer lies in Breathnach’s self-lacerating honesty and his skill in arranging fragments to create the momentum of a short story ... Overall the book is a high-risk enterprise. But its innovative impulse is feisty and thought provoking. And Breathnach is a winningly unguarded narrator, owning up to fibs, thefts, plagiarism and posturing, while simultaneously staking his claim as a serious-minded cultural commentator ... The book resonates as the story of many a twentysomething ... Tunnel Vision is written in that spirit: trying things out, not always successfully, but with inventiveness, candour and the promise of more to come.

Blake Morrison, Guardian
Critic Reviews

Kevin Breathnach is making what seem to me substantial contributions to the field of essay-writing. He brings a keen sensitivity to the practice of criticism and a superb critical intelligence to his own intimate personal narratives. His essays demonstrate not only an impressive depth of learning, but an even more necessary depth of feeling. He is certainly one of the most interesting writers working in Ireland today.

Sally Rooney
Critic Reviews

Blessed with a bracing critical intelligence, an urbane comic sensibility, and an extraordinary prose style, Kevin Breathnach is among the most original and exciting non-fiction writers to emerge in recent years.

Mark O'Connell
Critic Reviews

An extraordinarily intelligent, mobile and sensitive body of writing on subjects as wide-ranging as the work of Berenice Abbott, desire, pretentiousness, the Goncourt Brothers, loneliness, memory, and attachment ... Powerful.

Kate Briggs, The Tangerine
Critic Reviews

The latest example – following Sinéad Gleeson and Emilie Pine – of Irish writers dazzling with essays ... When Breathnach does choose honesty, it is unflinching ... So enjoyable to read.

Guardian
Critic Reviews

Recalls the spirit of Irish Modernism ... He’s imbibed the masters of the form, writing perceptively about Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, and cultivating a way with digression and drollery that makes him sound like a millennial Geoff Dyer ... Moving ... This singular debut suggests that in the essay he’s found his form, but it will still be intriguing to see if he reapplies his vision to fiction in the future.

Max Liu, Financial Times
KevinBreathnach

Kevin Breathnach is a writer from Dublin. His work has appeared in the Dublin Review, The White Review, gorse, The Tangerine, The New Inquiry, etcetera. He currently lives in Belfast.

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