New Ways to Kill Your Mother
Writers and Their Families
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- £1.99
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- £1.99
Publisher Description
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Through a series of accessible essays, lectures, and reviews that rove from Jane Austen to Brian Moore many of which appeared in either the London or New York Review of Books T ib n explores the ambivalent relationships that many writers of the past few centuries have had with their families. The topics T ib n (All a Novelist Needs: Essays on Henry James) addresses include the troubled bond between W.B. Yeats and his father, the fate of Thomas Mann's children, and John Cheever's alcoholic parenting and sexual hijinks. The book is divided into two sections: "Ireland," containing chapters about Irish poets, playwrights, and novelists, such as John Synge and Sebastian Barry; and "Elsewhere," which roves from Jorge Luis Borges to Tennessee Williams. With essays that prove more informative than argumentative, along with useful minibiographies of important authors, T ib n excels when discussing craft, such as in the opening essay, which compares structural devices in the novels of Jane Austen and Henry James that for some reason necessitate an absent mother. Though chock-full of biographic detail that will interest ardent readers, T ib n unfortunately resists drawing conclusions from the various case studies. But overall, given their figurative patricidal, matricidal, fratricidal, and infanticidal tendencies, one ought to be thankful not to have a writer in the family.
