Folger Book Club:
Dating Dr. Dil by Nisha Sharma
Our November book club selection is a contemporary romance adaptation of Taming of the Shrew set in a New Jersey South Asian community.
Booking and details
Dates Thu, Nov 7, 2024, 6:30pm
Tickets Free, Registration required
Duration 6:30pm - 8:00pm (ET)
Our November 2024 Pick
Dating Dr. Nil
by Nisha Sharma
Kareena Mann dreams of having a love story like her parents, but she prefers restoring her classic car to swiping right on dating apps. When her father announces he’s selling her mother’s home, Kareena makes a deal with him: he’ll gift her the house if she can get engaged in four months. Her search for her soulmate becomes impossible when her argument with Dr. Prem Verma, host of The Dr. Dil Show, goes viral. Now the only man in her life is the one she doesn’t want.
Dr. Prem Verma is dedicated to building a local community health center, but he needs to get donors with deep pockets. The Dr. Dil Show was doing just that, until his argument with Kareena went viral, and he’s left short changed. That’s when Kareena’s meddling aunties presented him with a solution: convince Kareena he’s her soulmate and they’ll fund his clinic.
Even though they have conflicting views on love-matches and arranged-matches, the more time Prem spends with Kareena, the more he begins to believe she’s the woman he wants to spend the rest of his life with. But for Prem and Kareena to find their happily ever after, they must admit that hate has turned into fate.
Why did we choose this?
The Folger Shakespeare Library’s collection explores not only Shakespeare’s life and works, but also the plays’ historical context, source material, critical and performance histories, and the ways in which they inspire and are adapted by contemporary novelists.
An increasingly popular genre, romance has been gaining in critical attention and readership in recent years as well as diversifying the types of love stories being told. Dating Dr. Dil sets Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew within a South Asian community in New Jersey, exploring ideas around familial obligation and cultural pressures.
About the Book Club
Our informal Book Club is free and open to all. Our picks range from historical fiction to adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, encompassing a wide variety of genres—all sourced from a different local, independent bookstore partner each month.
Each session begins with a guest speaker exploring that month’s pick and highlighting items from the Folger collection related to the plot and themes of the novel. After the presentation, participants will be broken into smaller groups for breakout discussions, moderated by a team of staff and volunteers.
Content transparency
Dating Dr. Dil includes explicit sexual material.
Guest Speaker
Anandi Rao
Dr. Anandi Rao is a lecturer (assistant professor) in South Asian Studies at SOAS, University of London. Her work lies at the intersection of postcolonial studies, gender and sexuality studies, translation studies and Shakespeare studies. Her work has been published in venues like Shakespeare Bulletin, Studies in South Asian Film and Media and South Asian Review. She is a Folger Short Term Fellow for the academic year 2024-2025.
We are thrilled this month to partner with Busboys and Poets, a restaurant, bar, bookstore and community gathering place. First established in 2005, Busboys and Poets was founded by owner Andy Shallal, an artist, activist, and restaurateur. After opening the flagship location at 14th and V Streets, NW DC, the neighboring residents, and the progressive community embraced Busboys and Poets, particularly activists opposed to the Iraq War.
Busboys and Poets is now located in nine distinctive neighborhoods in the Washington D.C Metropolitan and Baltimore areas. Busboys and Poets is a cultural hub for artists, activists, writers, thinkers, and dreamers.
You can purchase from their bookshop.org or Libro.fm site.
We would like to thank the following organization for its generous support of this program
