The Blue Hill Library and Blue Hill Books are cosponsoring an author talk with summer resident and professor of English Literature Nan Da, for her new book The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear, on Tuesday, August 12 at 7PM in the library's Howard Room.

Her new book, The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear, is a blending of a study of Shakespeare's cruelest and most confounding play and a personal memoir, one that draws parallels between Lear and her family and countrymen's experiences under Maoism from the 1940s to the present. Da begins in her childhood during Deng Xiaoping’s Opening and Reform, then moves back and forth between Lear and China. In her powerful reading, the unfinished business of Maoism and other elements of Chinese thought and culture—from Confucianism to the spectacles of Peking Opera—help elucidate the choices Shakespeare made in constructing Lear and the unbearable confusions he left behind.

Nan Z. Da is a professor of English Literature at Johns Hopkins University and a summer resident of Blue Hill.  She taught at the University of Notre Dame for nine years in the departments of English and East Asian Language and Literatures before moving to Johns Hopkins. 

For more information, please contact the library at 374-5515, or email Assistant Director Kayleigh Thomas at kayleigh.thomas@bhpl.net. Blue Hill Books will be onsite with copies of the book available for purchase.