“Audition” by Katie Kitamura

What unravels when a stranger claims he is your son? Take a front row seat for an exploration of power, performance, and identity in the LARB Book Club Spring 2025 pick “Audition” by Katie Kitamura.

February 23, 2025

LARB Book Club is thrilled to announce our Spring 2025 Book Club title: Audition by Katie Kitamura! To join the LARB Book Club, where we put you in conversation with editors and members and send a copy of the selected title to your door, become a Friend member today. This discussion has been rescheduled to April 30, 2025, at 6 p.m. PST on Zoom. Register for the discussion here.

¤

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.

¤

“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 métier of her own.”
—Rachel Kushner

“Among the most brilliant and profound writers working today.”
—Garth Greenwell

“This elegant knife of a story begins at a mundane restaurant in Manhattan’s financial district … So much glints below the surface in her purring, pared-down sentences … In this searing, chilly, and psychologically profound story lies insight into some harrowing human questions.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Kitamura’s novels are short, sharp and deadly. I’m not sure there’s anyone better writing in America today.”
—The Guardian

¤

Katie Kitamura is the acclaimed author of four previous novels, including Gone to the Forest, The Longshot, Intimacies, and A Separation, which was named best book of the year by over a dozen publications and has been translated into 16 languages. A master of psychological tension, Kitamura has crafted work described as “mesmerizing” and “unsettlingly brilliant.” She is a recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and Santa Maddalena Foundation, and has written for publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Triple Canopy, and Frieze.

¤

Join our Book Club today to get Audition plus our next three staff-curated selections, as well as access to our quarterly discussions hosted by LARB staff. Previous selections have included Lazarus Man by Richard Price, Entitlement by Rumaan Alam, and The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan.