New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers & Their Families
By Colm Toibin
2.5/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
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, with wit and rare tenderness, articulates the great joy of reading their work. In the piece on the Notebooks of Tennessee Williams, 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, Tóibín 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.The majority of these pieces were previously published in the Londron Review of Books, the New York Review Review of Books, and the Dublin Review. Three of the thirteen pieces have never appeared before.
Colm Toibin
Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island; The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster; as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and has been named as the Laureate for Irish Fiction for 2022–2024 by the Arts Council of Ireland. Three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.
Read more from Colm Toibin
The Magician: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mothers and Sons: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Blackwater Lightship Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Story of the Night: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Age of Innocence Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lady Gregory's Toothbrush Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5At the Jerusalem Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to New Ways to Kill Your Mother
Related ebooks
New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Women on Fire: Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAbsent Mothers Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFreeman's: Family Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Persuasion Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Golovlevs Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSex and Sensibility: 28 True Romances from the Lives of Single Women Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Further Chronicles of Avonlea: "Of all cats I loathed that white Persian cat of Aunt Cynthia's." Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poetry ’n Flow Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Literary Form Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLove Hurts Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Marriage in Pride and Prejudice: A Literary Essay Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The Narrows: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bloodsuckers on the Bayou: The Myths, Symbols, and Tales Behind HBO’s True Blood Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMrs. Everything: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5We All Lived in Bondi Then Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIn My Mother's House: A Daughter's Story Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFurther Chronicels of Avonlea Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Women's Wiles: Mystery Writers of America Presents: Classics, #2 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Book of Old Ladies: Celebrating Women of a Certain Age in Fiction Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVulnerable Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Well of Loneliness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The World of A Wrinkle in Time: The Making of the Movie Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJane Austen: A Life Revealed Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Secret Life of EL James, The Unauthorized Biography Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Cry of the Brethren Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJane Austen: pocket GIANTS Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Interzone #264 (May-June 2016) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsForbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Literary Criticism For You
The Art of Seduction: by Robert Greene | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The 48 Laws of Power: by Robert Greene | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael A. Singer | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/512 Rules For Life: by Jordan Peterson | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Behold a Pale Horse: by William Cooper | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Man's Search for Meaning: by Viktor E. Frankl | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Circe: by Madeline Miller | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of Virtues Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Verity: by Colleen Hoover | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5SUMMARY Of The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in Healthy Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.by Brené Brown | Conversation Starters Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Power of Habit: by Charles Duhigg | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain | Conversation Starters Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Letters to a Young Poet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Just Kids: A National Book Award Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gulag Archipelago: The Authorized Abridgement Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for New Ways to Kill Your Mother
2 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Toibin's collection of biographical literary essays focuses on the relationships between writers and their parents and the effects these relationships had upon their work. There's something here for everyone--which is both the book's strength and its weakness. While I read them all, this is the kind of collection from which a reader might best pick and choose. For me, the most intriguing essays were those on Jane Austen, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and Roddy Doyle, writers whose work I already enjoy. (Sorry to say, however, that Yeats comes off as somewhat of an idiot tyrant; in a second essay, Toibin devotes equal time to George, Yeats's much ill-treated wife.) With the exception of the section on Hart Crane, about whom I knew little but who led a particularly sad, brief life dominated by a snobbish, overbearing mother, I was less interested in Toibin's essays on writers whose work I either haven't read or don't particularly care for, among them Samuel Beckett, Sebastian Barry, Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges, and John Cheever. The effect of Toibin's essays on Mann and Cheever confirmed that I will probably never want to read their works; both come off as nasty, cruel human beings whose families suffered their worst abuse. I learned nothing that I didn't already know from the essay on Tennessee Williams, but it would probably be interesting to someone who came to it fresh.Toibin includes two essays on James Baldwin. The first, "James Baldwin and the 'American Confusion,'" provides an interesting discussion of the writer's place in U.S. literature, despite his ex-patriot status. In the second, Toibin compares the works of Baldwin and Barack Obama, both "Men without Fathers." I felt that he strained a bit too much to be haut courant in his effort to show Obama channeling Baldwin's prose style.Toibin is a sensitive reader who arrives at some brilliant insights, and he has unearthed intriguing tidbits about each author's life that make the essays more enjoyable than straight literary criticism might have been. Still, like me, most readers will probably find the collection rather uneven. (I thought the essay on Borges was never going to end, and it seemed quite repetitive.) To be best appreciated at its best, go at New Ways to Kill Your Mother like a box of fine chocolates: savor them one at a time.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Boring. Too literary. I was expecting something a bit more biographical about all the great writers' poor, neglected family members who pined for their fathers and husbands while said men toiled away in their lonely garret.