Katie Kitamura Discusses Audition with Meghan O'Rourke

Join BPL Presents as Katie Kitamura takes the Dweck stage to discuss Audition, 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.

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Katie Kitamura‘s most recent prior novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book. It was named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications and translated into sixteen languages and is being adapted for film. Her two previous novels, Gone to the Forest and The Longshot, were both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. A recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and Santa Maddalena Foundation, Katie has written for publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB Magazine, Triple Canopy, and Frieze. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

 

 

 

Meghan O'Rourke is the author of The New York Times Bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction, as well as the memoir The Long Goodbye and three books of poetry. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Front Page award for cultural criticism, and other honors, she writes often for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and other venues. She is a professor of creative writing at Yale University, and editor of The Yale Review.