New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families Audiobook

Quotes

• “Mr. Toibin is such an adept and morally serious close reader that his criticism becomes nearly as galvanizing as his fiction. There really aren’t, it turns out, any new ways to kill your mother, at least not artistically. But all the old ways, in Mr. Toibin’s telling, still work rather beautifully.”

  — New York Times

• “[A] lively exploration of writers and their families…There’s more storytelling than analysis, but the gossip is fascinating. Let’s just say Thomas Mann’s family is one that both Freud and V. C. Andrews would’ve loved.”

  — Entertainment Weekly

• “Colm Tóibín is a masterly novelist who is also a fine critic. New Ways to Kill Your Mother is most alive when these two sensibilities merge, and Mr. Tóibín shows the ways in which the imagination preys on personal history. One comes away with the unsubtle but powerful conclusion that a successful artist is one who learns, early on, to reimagine conflict; who is capable, as a result, of creating art more true and more telling than the quotidian realities thieved to make it.”

  — Wall Street Journal

• “Good biographers are rightly wary of tracing lines of cause and effect between a writer’s life and work; it takes a novelist’s leap of imagination and power of compressed suggestion to risk mixing them up as boldly as Tóibín does here…Enjoyably readable.”

  — Guardian (London)

• “Tóibín finds an engaging multiplicity of detail. And his critical voice is as seductive as the widely varying voices in his novels…Throughout the collection, Tóibín’s voice retains authority while also displaying some of the protean qualities of his fiction. He argues with himself often, not afraid to show us his critical restlessness, his change of mind. The sense of the writer as a perpetual wanderer is what makes these essays so lively: the house of literature has many mansions, and Tóibín is keen to tour them all.”

  — Christian Science Monitor

• “Fascinating…New Ways to Kill Your Mother not only illuminates the lives of writers we admire, but also raises subtle questions about the relatives we have, wish we had, or wish we didn’t. Editor’s recommendation.”

  — Barnes & Noble, editorial review

• “Irish novelist and essayist Tóibín (Brooklyn, 2009, etc.) investigates how writers’ classic works were inspired by their families—and sometimes in spite of them…But like all fine critics, Tóibín inspires readers to go back to the work, and he brings a human aspect to the works of seemingly deracinated authors like Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges…It’s a pleasure to watch Tóibín rove through nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary history.”

  — Kirkus Reviews