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Book Cover for: Audition, Katie Kitamura

Audition

Katie Kitamura

Reader Score

76%

76% of readers

recommend this book

"A tightly wound family drama that reads like a psychological thriller."--NPR

"Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams."--The Boston Globe

One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She's an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He's attractive, troubling, young--young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day - partner, parent, creator, muse - and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.

Taut and hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Riverhead Books
  • Publish Date: Apr 8th, 2025
  • Pages: 208
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.48in - 5.85in - 0.85in - 0.66lb
  • EAN: 9780593852323
  • Categories: PsychologicalWomenLiterary

About the Author

Katie Kitamura is the author of four previous novels, most recently A Separation and Intimacies, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for a Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, a Lannan fellowship, and many other honors, and her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

Praise for this book

Advance praise for Audition

"You have never read anything like this gorgeously disquieting book. Audition challenges our preconceptions about love, art, and selfhood--and, magnificently, our very idea of how a novel should unfold. If all the world's a stage, Kitamura reminds us that we never stop auditioning for our parts." --Hernan Diaz, author of Trust

"Katie Kitamura is one of our most brilliant writers, saying far more in her silences, blank spaces, and disruptions than most novelists can say in a hundred thousand words. Audition is eerie, a book so cold it feels hot. It hooked into my mind like a burr."
--Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds and Fates and Furies

Praise for Katie Kitamura:

"Katie Kitamura is a dizzyingly skilled writer whose fictions always seem to manage two contradictory effects: a supple seductive surface, under which the chaos of minds and repressed realities roil. She's an original, building an entire metier of her own."
--Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room