New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families

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.