Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel "Audition" asks who we are to the people we love. 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.

Called “...one of America's best contemporary writers,” by the BBC, Kitamura has work translated into 21 languages and in adaptations for film and television. Her novel "Intimacies" was one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021, was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. It was also one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2021.

Readings are followed by discussion with the author and UCLA professor Mona Simpson, who organizes this series.

Copresented by the UCLA Department of English. Limited books will be available for purchase.

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