In Katie Kitamura’s taut, hypnotic novel Audition, an acclaimed actress is confronted by a young man who claims to be her son. Halfway through, the narrative flips—upending what we think we know and unraveling competing stories about identity, desire, and performance.
Kitamura probes the porous boundaries between artistic forms, revealing how an actor’s craft can illuminate the shifting roles, impulses, and blind spots that shape a story.
Moderated by the Library’s Curator of Cultural Programs, Rachel Donadio, this conversation will explore how we construct, inhabit, and continually revise the selves we present to the world.
About the speakers:
Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel is Audition. A finalist for the Booker Prize, it was one of Barack Obama’s 2025 Summer Reads. She is also the author of Intimacies, one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021 and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2021. It was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. In France, it won the Prix Litteraire Lucien Barriere, was a finalist for the Grand Prix de l’Heroine, and was longlisted for the Prix Fragonard. Her work has been translated into 27 languages and is being adapted for film and television. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature, a Cullman Center Fellowship, among other fellowships. Katie has written for publications including the New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, the Guardian, BOMB, Triple Canopy, and Frieze. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.
Rachel Donadio, the Library’s Curator of Cultural Programs, is a Paris-based writer, journalist and critic, a contributing writer for the Atlantic, a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and a former European Culture Correspondent and Rome Bureau Chief of the New York Times.
