Colm Tóibín: New Ways to Kill Your Mother

I am grateful to the editors who published these pieces — especially to Mary Kay Wilmers and Daniel Soar at the London Review of Books ; to Robert Silvers, and the late Barbara Epstein, at the New York Review of Books ; and to Brendan Barrington at the Dublin Review . Also thanks to Angela Rohan for her work as an editor on the manuscript; and to Mary Mount, Ben Brusey and Keith Taylor at Penguin in London; to Nan Graham, Susan Muldow and Paul Whitlatch at Scribner in New York; and to Ellen Seligman at McClelland and Stewart in Toronto; also to my agent Peter Straus, and to Aidan Dunne, Catriona Crowe, Peggy O’Brien, Joseph Bartholomeo, Christina Hunt Mahony, Jonathan Allison, Cora Kaplan, Bill Schwartz, Lilian Chambers and Garry Hynes. I am especially grateful to the late Professor William Murphy for his kindness and encouragement when I worked on the letters of John Butler Yeats, which he had so painstakingly assembled, and which are kept in the Special Collections in the Library of Union College in Schenectady.

The South

The Heather Blazing

The Story of the Night

The Blackwater Lightship

The Master

Mothers and Sons

Brooklyn

The Empty Family

Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border

Homage to Barcelona

The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe

Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar

Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush

All a Novelist Needs: Essays on Henry James

Beauty in a Broken Place

Testament

Copyright © 2012 by Colm Tóibín

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Tóibín, Colm, 1955-

New ways to kill your mother : writers & their families / Colm Tóibín.

eISBN: 978-0-7710-8442-3

1. Families in literature. 2. Literature, Modern — History and criticism. I. Title.

PN56.F3T65 2012 809’.933525 C2011-907968-2

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

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