Katie Kitamura is the author of five alluring and disquieting novels, including the bestseller Intimacies, named one of the ten best books of 2021 by the New York Times, one of Barack Obama’s favourite books of the year, and a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, among other accolades. Her previous book, 2017’s A Separation, was named a best book of the year by more than a dozen publications, was translated into sixteen languages, and is currently being adapted for film. While she’s been likened to Rachel Cusk, Elena Ferrante, and W.G. Sebald, Kitamura is one of the most original novelists working today.
Audition, Kitamura’s latest novel, takes the ominous minimalism of her earlier books and pushes it to a virtuosic extreme. Its plot is deceptively simple. Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actor 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. In Lauren Groff’s words, “Audition is eerie, a book so cold it feels hot. It hooked into my mind like a burr.”
In this exclusive Toronto premiere, Kitamura joins writer, translator and bookseller Claire Foster on the Hot Docs stage to discuss Audition. Be among the first to experience one of the most hypnotic, unnerving novels of the year.
Audition will be available for purchase at the event by TYPE Books.
Thank you to our partners at Penguin Random House Canada and TYPE Books.
TICKETS (+HST)
Orchestra (Stage View): $15
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