Review
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025 BY THE WASHINGTON POST, VOGUE, ROLLING STONE, NBC.COM, THE GUARDIAN, AND THE FINANCIAL TIMES
“A blisteringly incisive, coolly devastating tour de force of controlled menace…. Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams.”
—Priscilla Gilman, Boston Globe
“Kitamura excels at creating an atmosphere of foreboding … [She] reveals how much lies beneath the surfaces of our bodies and our sentences, and how much about one another we cannot know.”
—The New Republic
“What Kitamura does is different. She is one of very few serious fiction writers who insist on not only describing but enacting the mirrored maze of impaired intimacy—the frustrating, unaccommodating realism we twenty-first-century dwellers deserve.”
—Harper’s
“A brilliantly disarming read.”
—Bustle
“Slim, yet powerful.”
—Town & Country
“Katie Kitamura writes with a spare, almost clinical efficiency, but that doesn’t limit the depth of her characters or the complexity of the dynamics she depicts… The strange pendulum swing from one scenario to the other catches you off guard—and isn’t that the mark of truly exciting fiction?”
—Vogue
“Beguiling… Kitamura chooses to upend everything … as her story creeps toward a brutal climax. … Hypnotic and finely observant … sleek, provocative … a must for literary collections and for book club discussions.”
—Library Journal
“[An] elegant knife of a story. . . So much glints below the surface in [Kitamura’s] purring, pared-down sentences. . .In this searing, chilly, and psychologically profound story lies insight into some harrowing human questions.”
—Kirkus, starred review
“Kitamura serves up a taut and alluring novel…complex and engrossing…Readers won’t be able to put this down.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Kitamura is a master of writing people who are both inscrutable and glaringly, psychically alive, which is to say real people, and obfuscation seems the point here, making this a perfect fit for readers of literary-puzzle novels.”
—Booklist
"Katie Kitamura is 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 metier of her own."
—Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room
“You have never read anything like this gorgeously disquieting book. Audition challenges our preconceptions about love, art, and selfhood—and, magnificently, our very idea of how a novel should unfold. If all the world’s a stage, Kitamura reminds us that we never stop auditioning for our parts.”
—Hernan Diaz, author of Trust
“Katie Kitamura is one of our most brilliant writers, saying far more in her silences, blank spaces, and disruptions than most novelists can say in a hundred thousand words. Auditionis eerie, a book so cold it feels hot. It hooked into my mind like a burr.”
—Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wildsand Fates and Furies
About the Author
Katie Kitamura is the author of four previous novels, most recently A Separation and Intimacies, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for a Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, a Lannan fellowship, and many other honors, and her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.
