Summary and Reviews of Audition by Katia Kitamura

Media Reviews

Bustle A brilliantly disarming read.

Harper's Magazine 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.

The New Republic 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.

Vogue 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?

Town and Country Slim, yet powerful.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review) In this searing, chilly, and psychologically profound story lies insight into some harrowing human questions.

Library Journal As in her previous works, Kitamura's prose is hypnotic and finely observant, with a cool detachment that avid readers of Rachel Cusk's 'Outline' trilogy will recognize.

Publishers Weekly (starred review) [A] taut and alluring novel...Readers won't be able to put this down.

 Hernan Diaz, author of Trust 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.

 Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds and Fates and Furies 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. Audition is eerie, a book so cold it feels hot. It hooked into my mind like a burr.