Recommendations
Books Like King Lear
Best books to read after King Lear by William Shakespeare
Readers who love King Lear are drawn to its combination of Shakespeare's most devastating tragedy, the stripped-down self that Lear discovers on the heath, the Edgar/Gloucester subplot that mirrors the main action, and the ending — Cordelia hanged, Lear dead — so cruel that the 17th century rewrote it. They want works that deal with aging and family betrayal, the destruction of a patriarch, the nature of ingratitude, and the great tradition of Lear adaptations from Kurosawa to Smiley.
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A Thousand Acres
by Jane Smiley
The Pulitzer Prize-winning retelling of King Lear on an Iowa farm — Smiley transposes the play to the American Midwest, with a farmer dividing his land between three daughters and the Cordelia figure as the youngest who refuses; the most celebrated modern retelling of Lear in fiction.
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Ran
by Akira Kurosawa
Kurosawa's film transposition of King Lear to feudal Japan — changing Lear's daughters to sons and adding elements of Noh theatre, Ran is one of the great Shakespeare adaptations and one of the great films of the 1980s; the most powerful visual interpretation of the play.
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The Stone Diaries
by Carol Shields
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that inhabits King Lear's concern with aging, the family, and what is owed between generations — Shields's Daisy Goodwill's life from birth to death is a sustained meditation on what a woman's life amounts to and how it is received by those who should have loved her.
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The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
The contemporary American novel most directly in the Lear tradition — Alfred Lambert's decline and his children's inability to face it is Franzen's version of the Lear problem: what aging parents require from adult children and what the children cannot or will not give.
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Hamlet
by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's other supreme tragedy — Hamlet and King Lear are the twin peaks of Shakespeare's achievement, and reading both reveals the full range of what he could do with tragic form: Hamlet's interiority against Lear's exposure, Hamlet's delayed action against Lear's catastrophic haste.
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Cordelia's Honor
by Lois McMaster Bujold
Bujold's science fiction retelling of the Lear story in space — Cordelia Vorkosigan is the most direct naming of the Lear-Cordelia tradition in contemporary SF; shares King Lear's concern with a woman of principle navigating the demands of loyalty in a violent patriarchal world.
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The Dutch House
by Ann Patchett
The contemporary novel in the Lear tradition of family, inheritance, and the destruction of children by their parents — two siblings obsessed with the house they were expelled from by their stepmother share Lear's concern with what happens when family goes wrong and what love requires from the dispossessed.
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Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
by Max Porter
The contemporary prose poem most directly in the spirit of King Lear's investigation of grief — Porter's Crow who comes to a bereaved father and his sons inhabits the same territory as Lear's experience of loss, the mad voices on the heath, and the question of what art can do when language fails.
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