Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know Hardcover by Colm Tóibín

Product Details

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart (2018-10-23)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 192 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780771070921
• Item Weight: 328.86 grams
• Dimensions: 8.56 x 5.89 x 0.75 cm

Award-winning author Colm Tóibín turns his incisive gaze to three of the world's greatest writers, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce, and their earliest influences: their fathers.

"A father... is a necessary evil." Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses

In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, Colm Tóibín illuminates not only the complex relationships between three of the greatest writers in the English language and their fathers, but also illustrates the surprising ways they surface in their work. From Wilde's doctor father, a brilliant statistician and amateur archaeologist, who was taken to court by an obsessed lover in a strange premonition of what would happen to his son; to Yeats' father, an impoverished artist and brilliant letter-writer who could never finish a painting; to John Stanislaus Joyce, a singer, drinker, and storyteller, a man unwilling to provide for his large family, whom his son James memorialised in his writing, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know brilliantly combines biography and literary appreciation and is a revealing, personal new look at the lives of three major literary icons.

About the Author

COLM TÓIBÍN is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning author of many novels, including The Blackwater Lightship, The Master, and The Testament of Mary, all three of which were nominated for the Booker Prize. The Master also won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Le Prix du meilleur livre etranger, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Novel Award, and finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, was made into an Oscar-nominated film in 2015. Nora Webster was a New York Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Folio Prize. He is also the author of many short stories and works of non-fiction. He mainly lives in Dublin, Ireland.