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

Toibin, Colm

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1451668562 ISBN 13: 9781451668568

Publisher: Scribner Book Company, 2013

Synopsis

Novelist and critic Colm Tóibín provides "a fascinating exploration of writers and their families" (Entertainment Weekly) and "an excellent guide through the dark terrain of unconscious desires" (The Evening Standard) in this brilliant collection of essays that explore the relationships of writers to their families and their work.

Novelist and critic Colm Tóibín explores the relationships of writers with their families and their work in the brilliant, nuanced, and wholly original New Ways to Kill Your Mother.

Tóibín--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 between W. B. Yeats and his father, Thomas Mann and his children, Jane Austen and her aunts, and Tennessee Williams and his sister, Tóibín examines a world of relations, richly comic or savage in their implications. 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.

About this title

Review:

"[Toibin possesses a] vast understanding of fiction and its uses, and a mind that processes novels and ideas like a rumbling supercomputer...Mr. Toibin is such an adept and morally serious close reader that his criticism becomes nearly as galvanizing as his fiction. There really aren't, it turns out, any new ways to kill your mother, at least not artistically. But all the old ways, in Mr. Toibin's telling, still work rather beautifully."--Dwight Garner "The New York Times "

"[A] lively exploration of writers and their families...Fascinating."--Melissa Maerz "Entertainment Weekly "

"A typical Tóibín essay describes the arc of a writer's development and life, and uses the writer's own words to draw graceful conclusions about his temperament and biography...Tóibín's skill at glossing the lives of great writers is on display in his latest essay collection."--Andrew Martin "Bookforum "

"Tóibín finds an engaging multiplicity of detail. And his critical voice is as seductive as the widely varying voices in his novels."--Donna Rifkind "Barnes & Noble Review "

"Tóibín is a masterly novelist who is also a fine critic...powerful."--Mira Sethi "Wall Street Journal "

"[Tóibín writes] shrewdly and passionately as both critic and novelist."--Fred Setterberg "Minneapolis Star Tribune "

"Like all fine critics, Tóibín inspires readers to go back to the work, and he brings a human aspect to the works of seemingly deracinated authors like Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges...It's a pleasure to watch Tóibín rove through 19th and 20th-century literary history."--Kirkus Reviews

"Tóibín excels when discussing craft...[New Ways to Kill Your Mother is] chock-full of biographic detail that will interest ardent readers."--Publishers Weekly

From the Back Cover:

A brilliant book' New Statesman

'Teasing, wonderfully funny' Guardian

In pieces that range from the importance of aunts (and the death of parents) in the English nineteenth-century novel to the relationship between fathers and sons in the writing of James Baldwin and Barack Obama, Colm Tóibín illuminates not only the intimate connections between writers and their families but also articulates, with a rare tenderness and wit, the great joy of reading their work.

In his essay on the Notebooks of Tennessee Williams, Colm Tóibín reveals an artist 'alone and deeply fearful and unusually selfish' and one profoundly tormented by his sister's mental illness. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father or Thomas Mann and his children or J.M. Synge and his mother, Toibin examines a world of family relations, richly comic or savage in its implications. In Roddy Doyle's writing on his parents we see an Ireland reinvented. From the dreams and nightmares of John Cheever's journals Tóibín makes flesh this darkly comic misanthrope and his relationship to his wife and his children. 'Educating an unintellectual woman,' Cheever remarked, 'is like letting a rattlesnake into the house.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1451668562
• ISBN 13: 9781451668568
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288