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Explore the unsettling emotional terrain of Audition as Katie Kitamura discusses her latest novel in conversation with Karen Russell.

What happens when a carefully constructed life begins to feel like a performance with no clear audience? Audition by Katie Kitamura is a taut, psychologically charged novel about art, intimacy, and the roles we play for those closest to us. A middle-aged actress finds her sense of self unraveling as rehearsals blur with real life, and long-buried tensions surface in her family and relationships. As conversations grow fraught and silences thicken, certainty gives way to unease. With precise prose and mounting tension, Kitamura probes power, desire, and the fragile boundaries between who we are and who we pretend to be. It’s a quietly gripping exploration of identity, control, and the cost of being truly seen.

Books will be available for purchase, and a signing with the author will take place in the lobby following the program.

Katie Kitamura is the author of Audition, her most recent novel and a finalist for the Booker Prize, as well as a selection for Barack Obama’s 2025 Summer Reads. She is also the author of Intimacies, named one of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021 and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of that year. Her earlier novels include A Separation, a New York Times Notable Book, and Gone to the Forest and The Longshot, both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. Her work has been translated into 27 languages and is being adapted for film and television. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize in Literature, Kitamura teaches creative writing at New York University.

Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including Swamplandia!, a New York Times Best Book of the Year and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and the bestselling Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Her latest novel, The Antidote, was a finalist for the National Book Award and is currently longlisted for the 2026 National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN America Jean Stein Book Award. Her honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two National Magazine Awards for Fiction. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Stanford University.