New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families
352 pages
|Published: 1 Jan 2012
|Editions
|Details
This edition
ISBN: 9780771084379
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Publisher: Emblem Editions
Publication date: 1 May 2012
Description
In this fascinating, informative, and entertaining collection, internationally acclaimed, award-winning author Colm Tóibín turns his attention to the intricacies of family relationships in literature and writing.
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. 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.
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. 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.
