New Ways to Kill Your Mother

From Colm Toibin comes "New Ways to Kill Your Mother", a fabulously entertaining book about writers and their families. In this wonderfully entertaining and enlightening collection, Colm Toibin 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...Toibin 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"). Colm Toibin was born in Ireland in 1955.
He is the author of seven novels, including "The Master" which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize , Brooklyn which won the Costa Novel Award and, most recently, "The Testament of Mary", and two volumes of short stories. His non-fiction includes "Lady Gregory's Toothbrush" and "Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almovodar". He is a contributing editor at the "London Review of Books" and has been visiting writer at Stanford, Princeton, the University of Texas at Austin and Manchester University. He is currently Mellon Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.