11-04-2025
Who Are We, Really?
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
If someone had no relationships—no colleagues to appease, no parents to make proud, no lovers to impress—how might they behave? With those interactions removed, would you be able to glimpse, as Jordan Kisner wrote in our May issue, an 'authentic, independent self'? The author Katie Kitamura, whose new novel, Audition, is the subject of Kisner's essay, isn't sure. As she said in a recent interview, 'When you take away all of the role-playing, all of the performance, what is left?' It could be someone free and real, or it could be 'a profoundly raw, destabilized, possibly non-functioning self.' Audition, as Kisner notes, is part of a recent subgenre of literature that explores this very question. The book is the last installment of a loose, thematically connected trilogy from Kitamura; it follows a nameless actor who reveals very little of herself, instead conveying the words, identities, and stories of the characters she plays.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic 's Books section:
The comic-book artist who mastered space and time
The new king of tech
A love-hate letter to technology
Though we don't know much about the main character, her gender is crucial to the story: Women, Kisner argues, are frequently defined by their roles, as mothers, say, or wives, before being appreciated as individuals. Kisner identifies a number of books that imagine a woman who is 'extracted from her core relational ties.' Protagonists in, for example, Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy, Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation, and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation seem somewhat vacant and alienated from the people around them. In many instances, readers don't know their names or the basics of their backstories. Even the characters themselves, Kisner observes, seem unsure of who they really are.
