Katie Kitamura — Audition - with Kat Chow

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.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.Kitamura will be in conversation with Kat Chow, a reporter and writer, and the author of Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir, named a Notable Book by The New York Times. She was a reporter at NPR, where she was a founding member of the Code Switch team and podcast. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, New York Magazine’s The Cut and on Radiolab, among others. She's a contributor to Pop Culture Happy Hour and Slate’s Culture Gabfest, and has hosted Slate’s The Waves. She’s received residency fellowships from Storyknife and Millay Arts, as well as an inaugural Yi Dae Up fellowship at the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. She is the 2024-25 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington at George Washington University where she will teach creative nonfiction.*recorded 4/10/2025