New Ways To Kill Your Mother

Bol

From Colm Tóibín comes New Ways to Kill Your Mother, a fabulously entertaining book about writers and their families. In this wonderfully entertaining and enlightening collection, Colm Tóibín not only explores the often tense relationship between writers and their families but also conveys, with a rare tenderness and wit, the great joy of reading their work. Here is W.B. Yeats harshly responding to his own father's literary efforts; Thomas Mann ruining his children's prospects; Tennessee Williams haunted by his sister's mental illness; and John Cheever being beastly to his wife. Praise for New Ways to Kill Your Mother: 'A brilliant book...Tóibín is a supple, subtle thinker, alive to hints and undertones, wary of absolute truths' Robert Hanks, New Statesman 'A penetrating and often very funny inquiry into the fraught complicity between parent and child, brother and sister' Daily Telegraph' Insightful and compassionate, assured and knowledgeable, never less than fascinating. An impressive, fine and engaging collection' Independent on Sunday Colm Tóibín was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of seven novels, including The Master which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize , Brooklyn which won the Costa Novel Award and, most recently, The Testament of Mary, and two volumes of short stories. His non-fiction includes Lady Gregory's Toothbrush and Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almovodar. He is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books and has been visiting writer at Stanford, Princeton, the University of Texas at Austin and Manchester University. He is currently Mellon Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Bol Partner

In a brilliant, nuanced, and wholly original collection of essays, the bestselling and award-winning author of Brooklyn and The Empty Family offers a fascinating exploration of famous writers’ relationships to their families and their work. In a brilliant, nuanced and wholly original collection of essays, the novelist and critic Colm Tóibín explores the relationships of writers to their families and their work. From Jane Austen’s aunts to Tennessee Williams’s mentally ill sister, the impact of intimate family dynamics can be seen in many of literature’s greatest works. Tóibín, celebrated both for his award-winning fiction and his provocative book reviews and essays, and currently the Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Columbia, traces and interprets those intriguing, eccentric, often twisted family ties in New Ways to Kill Your Mother. Through the relationship between W. B. Yeats and his father, Thomas Mann and his children, and J. M. Synge and his mother, Tóibín examines a world of relations, richly comic or savage in its implications. In Roddy Doyle’s writing on his parents, Tóibín perceives an Ireland reinvented. From the dreams and nightmares of John Cheever’s journals, Tóibín illuminates this darkly comic misanthrope and his relationship to his wife and his children. “Educating an intellectual woman,” Cheever remarked, “is like letting a rattlesnake into the house.” Acutely perceptive and imbued with rare tenderness and wit, New Ways to Kill Your Mother is a fascinating look at writers’ most influential bonds and a secret key to understanding and enjoying their work.