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

Toibin, Colm

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1451668554 ISBN 13: 9781451668551

Publisher: Scribner, 2012

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

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

Illuminates, startles and delights...a consistingtly revealing look at how writers' relationships have influenced their work, [which] also sheds fascinating light on Toibin himself (Sunday Telegraph)

These are foxy essays...Toibin talks about writers' families...with great subtlety and sometimes with splendid impudence (The Spectator)

Insightful and compassionate...the breadth and depth of analysis here is impressive...Toibin wears his knowledge very lightly...a fine and engaging collection (Independent on Sunday)

Toibin 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)

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

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

Toibin knows how to select just the right detail...to feed our curiosity...a masterly writer, working at the full stretch of his powers (Guardian)

Compelling...remarkable (The Times)

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
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1451668554
• ISBN 13: 9781451668551
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 345