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. M. Synge and his mother, Tóibín examines a world of relations, richly comic or savage in its implications. In Roddy Doyle’s writing on his parents, Tóibín perceives an Ireland reinvented. From the dreams and nightmares of John Cheever’s journals, Tóibín illuminates this darkly comic misanthrope and his relationship to his wife and his children. “Educating an intellectual woman,” Cheever remarked, “is like letting a rattlesnake into the house.” Acutely perceptive and imbued with rare tenderness and wit, New Ways to Kill Your Mother is a fascinating look at writers’ most influential bonds and a secret key to understanding and enjoying their work.

科爾姆·托賓

愛爾蘭小說傢、劇作傢。畢業於都柏林大學，主修曆史和英文。畢業後前往巴塞羅那，居住瞭三年，這段經曆成瞭他首部小說《南方》的素材。曾投身新聞業，後遊曆非洲和南美洲。托賓的著作豐厚：《黑水燈塔船》獲得英國布剋奬，並獲得IMPAC都柏林國際文學奬提名；《大師》獲得IMPAC都柏林國際文學奬、法國最佳小說奬等奬項；另有短篇小說集《母與子》《空蕩蕩的傢》、遊記《到世界盡頭》等。