• The My Reading series offers personal models of what it is like to care about particular authors and works, and to show their effect upon a reader's own thinking and development
• A personal meditation on King Lear that considers how the play both reflects and relieves human suffering
• Provides scene by scene guidance and describes character development to make King Lear accessible to new readers
• An introduction to vulnerable reading as a way of teaching literature to healthcare students and practitioners

    
A book on the experience of reading Shakespeare's 'dark plays'.
   
As part of the My Reading series, King Lear is a personal meditation on a great literary work. Arthur Frank brings a career of studying illness experience and suffering to consider how King Lear can aid people whose lives need help. Reading King Lear leads Frank to both an encounter with his own old age and a source of consolation-companionship—in his future. This book does not try to minimize vulnerabilities, but it shows what is fully human, and thus shared, in suffering. The book introduces readers to King Lear, and it invites those who know the play to a new consideration for its ability to affect people's lives.