New Ways to Kill Your Mother

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. Colm Tóibín 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.