New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families - Softcover

Tóibín, Colm

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141041765 ISBN 13: 9780141041766

Publisher: Penguin, 2013

Synopsis

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

About this title

Product Description:

New Ways to Kill Your Mother Novelist and critic Colm Toibin explores the relationships of writers with their families and their work in the brilliant, nuanced, and wholly original "New Ways to Kill Your Mother." Toibin--celebrated both for his award-winning fiction and his provocative book reviews and essays--traces the intriguing, often twisted family ties of writers in the books they leave behind. Through the relationship ... Full description

Review:

A brilliant book...Tóibín is a supple, subtle thinker, alive to hints and undertones, wary of absolute truths. (New Statesman)

Insightful and compassionate, assured and knowledgeable, never less than fascinating. An impressive, fine and engaging collection (Independent on Sunday)

These are foxy essays. Tóibín knows lots of things, and his characteristic approach is to sneak up on things steadily. Tóibín, with great subtlety and sometimes with splendid impudence, is interested here in what you might call the higher gossip (Spectator)

Tóibín's engaged in white heat. A masterly writer, working at the full stretch of his powers (Guardian)

A consistently revealing look at how writers' relationships have influenced their work (Sunday Telegraph)

'Calm and pure, a tone that's unfailingly warm and compassionate...Colm Tóibín's prose meets Orwell's standard: it's like a pane of clear glass (Irish Times)

Tóibín is a particularly compelling guide to fellow novelists. A wide-ranging and enlightening study of the potentially stifling family and the individual spirit of the writer (Sunday Times)

He writes in muscular prose with a keen eye for detail (Economist)

Penetrating and often very funny...Tóibín is a master (Telegraph)

Colm Tóibín is an exceptionally fine writer...He puts his natural empathy to good use in these essays...outstanding (Mail on Sunday)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0141041765
• ISBN 13: 9780141041766
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352