Katie Kitamura in Conversation with Yiyun Li
Tuesday, Oct. 28, 6 p.m., hosted in Princeton
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025! Celebrated author and Princeton University graduate Katie Kitamura discusses her acclaimed new novel, “Audition,” with National Book Award finalist Yiyun Li, head of Princeton’s creative writing program. A haunting exploration of identity and performance, “Audition” follows an actress whose carefully controlled world begins to unravel after a mysterious young man claims to be her son.
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About the Book
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025!
“A tightly wound family drama that reads like a psychological thriller.”—NPR
“Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams.”—The Boston Globe
From the publisher: 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.
About the Author
Katie Kitamura is the author of five novels, most recently “Audition,” shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, and “Intimacies,” named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021, longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and a finalist for a Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, fellowships from the Cullman Center and the Lannan Foundation, and many other honors. Her work has been translated into 21 languages. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.
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