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New Ways to Kill Your Mother
- Writers and Their Families
- Narrated by: Gerard Doyle
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
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Publisher's summary
In a brilliant, nuanced, and wholly original collection of essays, the best-selling and award-winning author of Brooklyn and The Empty Family offers a fascinating exploration of famous writers’ relationships 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. In New Ways to Kill Your Mother, Colm Tóibín - celebrated both for his award-winning fiction and his provocative book reviews and essays, and currently the prestigious Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Columbia - traces and interprets those intriguing, eccentric, often twisted family ties.
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 thought-provoking look at writers’ most influential bonds and a secret key to reading and enjoying their work.
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In The Voice Is All, Joyce Johnson - coauthor of the classic memoir Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac - brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road.
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Kerouac's Voice
- By Robert L. Stofel on 09-26-12
By: Joyce Johnson
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At the Existentialist Café
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- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
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By: Sarah Bakewell
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I Am Dynamite!
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- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 17 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Nietzsche wrote that all philosophy is autobiographical, and in this vividly compelling, myth-shattering biography, Sue Prideaux brings listeners into the world of this brilliant, eccentric, and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand history's most misunderstood philosopher.
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Fascinating; tragic
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By: Sue Prideaux
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Looking for Lorraine
- The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
- By: Imani Perry
- Narrated by: LisaGay Hamilton
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now.
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Radiant
- By Rose Brookins on 03-20-19
By: Imani Perry
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The Club
- Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
- By: Leo Damrosch
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 15 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk's Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually, the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as "the Club". In this captivating audiobook, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters.
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Wonderful survey
- By Tad Davis on 05-10-19
By: Leo Damrosch
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The Republic of Imagination
- America in Three Books
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Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination.
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Love
- By Rebecca on 05-29-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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Georgette Heyer
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Georgette Heyer remains an enduring international best seller, read and loved by four generations of readers and extolled by today's best-selling authors. Despite her enormous popularity, she never gave an interview or appeared in public. Georgette Heyer wrote her first novel, The Black Moth, when she was 17 in order to amuse her convalescent brother. It was published in 1921 to instant success, and 90 years later it has never been out of print.
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Heyer as a person
- By Jerri C on 06-15-15
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Kierkegaard
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An accessible, expert introduction to one of the greatest minds of 19th century. Whether you're completely new to him, or if you're already familiar with his work, Kierkegaard: A Single Life presents a fresh understanding of his life and thought. Kierkegaard was a brilliant and enigmatic loner whose ideas permeated culture, shaped modern Christianity, and influenced people as diverse as Franz Kafka and Martin Luther King Jr. Though few people today have read his work, that lack of familiarity with the real Kierkegaard is changing with this biography by scholar Stephen Backhouse.
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Great!
- By Will on 07-11-17
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Empire of Self
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- By: Jay Parini
- Narrated by: John Lescault
- Length: 16 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The product of 30 years of friendship and conversation, Jay Parini's Empire of Self probes behind the glittering surface of Gore Vidal's colorful life to reveal the complex emotional and sexual truth underlying his celebrity-strewn life. But there is plenty of glittering surface as well - a virtual who's who of the American Century, from Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart through the Kennedys, Princess Margaret, and the creme de la creme of Hollywood.
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Well done!
- By Christopher on 03-22-16
By: Jay Parini
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Becoming Faulkner
- The Art and Life of William Faulker
- By: Philip Weinstein
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
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Performance
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William Faulkner was the greatest American novelist of the 20th century, yet he lived a life marked by a pervasive sense of failure. Throughout his career, he remained haunted by his inability to master a series of personal and professional challenges: his less-than-heroic military career; the loss of his brother in an airplane crash; a disappointing stint as a Hollywood screenwriter; and a destructive bout with alcoholism.
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Miss.'s BCS-Bundren.Compson.Snopes/Sutpen/Sartoris
- By W Perry Hall on 05-01-14
By: Philip Weinstein
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Melville in Love
- The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of Moby-Dick
- By: Michael Shelden
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Herman Melville's epic novel, Moby-Dick, was a spectacular failure when it was published in 1851, effectively ending its author's rise to literary fame. Because he was neglected by academics for so long, and because he made little effort to preserve his legacy, we know very little about Melville, and even less about what he called his "wicked book". Scholars still puzzle over what drove Melville to invent Captain Ahab's mad pursuit of the great white whale.
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intriguing
- By Jean on 06-18-16
By: Michael Shelden
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Ayn Rand and the World She Made
- By: Anne C. Heller
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 19 hrs and 36 mins
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Ayn Rand is the author of two phenomenally best-selling ideological novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which have sold over 12 million copies in the United States alone. Through them, she built a right-wing cult following in the late 1950s and became the guiding light of Libertarianism and of White House economic policy in the 1960s and '70s. Her defenses of radical individualism and of selfishness as a "capitalist virtue" have permanently altered the American cultural landscape.
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Great history of both Rand and her era
- By Mark on 08-07-10
By: Anne C. Heller
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What listeners say about New Ways to Kill Your Mother
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Cariola
- 11-02-13
A Literary Box of Chocolates
Toibin's collection of biographical literary essays focuses on the relationships between writers and their parents and the effects these relationships had upon their work. There's something here for everyone--which is both the book's strength and its weakness. While I read them all, this is the kind of collection from which a reader might best pick and choose. For me, the most intriguing essays were those on Jane Austen, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and Roddy Doyle, writers whose work I already enjoy. (Sorry to say, however, that Yeats comes off as somewhat of an idiot tyrant; in a second essay, Toibin devotes equal time to George, Yeats's much ill-treated wife.)
With the exception of the section on Hart Crane, about whom I knew little but who led a particularly sad, brief life dominated by a snobbish, overbearing mother, I was less interested in Toibin's essays on writers whose work I either haven't read or don't particularly care for, among them Samuel Beckett, Sebastian Barry, Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges, and John Cheever. The effect of Toibin's essays on Mann and Cheever confirmed that I will probably never want to read their works; both come off as nasty, cruel human beings whose families suffered their worst abuse. I learned nothing that I didn't already know from the essay on Tennessee Williams, but it would probably be interesting to someone who came to it fresh.
Toibin includes two essays on James Baldwin. The first, "James Baldwin and the 'American Confusion,'" provides an interesting discussion of the writer's place in U.S. literature, despite his ex-patriot status. In the second, Toibin compares the works of Baldwin and Barack Obama, both "Men without Fathers." I felt that he strained a bit too much to be haut courant in his effort to show Obama channeling Baldwin's prose style.
Toibin is a sensitive reader who arrives at some brilliant insights, and he has unearthed intriguing tidbits about each author's life that make the essays more enjoyable than straight literary criticism might have been. Still, like me, most readers will probably find the collection rather uneven. (I thought the essay on Borges was never going to end, and it seemed quite repetitive.) To be best appreciated at its best, go at New Ways to Kill Your Mother like a box of fine chocolates: savor them one at a time. You'll find some of those darn jellies in the bunch, but there are enough caramels and cherry cordials to make it worth your while.
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- Thoughtful Reader
- 08-14-12
Alluring Title, but Deceptive
Is there anything you would change about this book?
The audience for this scholarly work of literary criticism is the academic community. The title implies something perhaps more playful. I wish I could have the title myself--and am sorry I didn't think it up first!
How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?
Like everything Toibin writes, the style is masterful, the insights fresh and intelligent. It is not fiction; rather, it is a collection of essays about well-known literary works, their authors, and their characters. It is not "enjoyable" in the sense of easy-reading. This is highbrow prose for literary scholars.
Any additional comments?
Honestly, I purchased the book because I thought it would be about Toibin's personal analysis and his own mother's effect on his life & his writing. Although it wasn't what I expected, it's full of character analysis and the relationship of fictional mothers & fathers, aunts and stepmothers as well as the relationships of actual parents and their writer-children. Complex and engrossing.
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