Latest news with #KatieKitamura
Hindustan Times
03-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
From Brooklyn to Rome: Katie Kitamura on writing, family, pleasure
Dear Reader, I wrote Audition during the pandemic, during that tension of sharing space again with people you love, having to recalibrate those relationships. That fed into the story --- Katie Kitamura (The The Booker Prize longlist is out and our most discussed book of the year is on it! For weeks we have been obsessed with this brilliantly constructed novella. What is the truth of our protagonist's life? We don't know what to believe about this New York-based theatre actor — she is an unreliable narrator for sure — but which version of herself is 'true'? There is a war on, when we read the book. 'Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience,' says George Eliot, and in a bizarre sequence of events, we watch this come true. We see a correspondence between the competing narratives in Audition and in life. On national television, Indian anchors declare they have won the war. On the internet, Pakistan claims it has won, having shot down Indian fighter jets. There is a third version as the US takes credit for a ceasefire, contradicting the Indian and the Pakistani versions. Reading Audition, we don't know what to believe. Is our protagonist really a mother — is the young man called Xavier her biological son? And can we ever truly know a person? It is thrilling when Katie Kitamura agrees to join us on Zoom to discuss her writing. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation — everything from the truth of this Booker Prize longlisted novella to how Katie met her writer husband Hari Kunzru, plus tips on how to get your children to read. Katie Kitamura on Zoom Thank you for joining us on your Friday morning. Can you tell us what you see out of your window? I am at home in Brooklyn, and when I look out the window, I see trees, which is surprising because I'm in the middle of a city, but in fact, the neighborhood where I live has these enormous, very established trees that are about five stories tall. Your parents immigrated from Japan when they were in their twenties. You were born in California and grew up living on the college campus at UC Davis. What was your childhood like? It was an idyllic childhood, full of reading. I read indiscriminately — Little Women and the Ellen Montgomery series, Anne of Green Gables, Sweet Valley High. We had a full shelf of Agatha Christie novels and my mother and I read them together. I loved reading those books and the pleasure remained even once you knew the solution. And that taught me about reading and pleasure — that it isn't simply linked to plot and narrative; fiction can feel like a world that you can escape into. You're married to the novelist Hari Kunzru; you're this power literary couple. And of course, we've read Hari's work, and we love it — and love yours too. So can we be a little cheesy and ask you how you met? We met a long time ago, at a dinner that Zadie Smith organised. I was working at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. And Zadie was a writer-in-residence, and one of the things she did as part of her program was to organize a dinner with like 20 of the most exciting new young writers in Britain, and Hari was one of them. And I was not. I was not even writing at the time. I was just working, but Zadie had asked me to help organize this and also come to the dinner, and that's when I first met Hari, and we stayed friends till we got together eight or nine years later. And then, Katie, you wrote The Longshot, and it was set in the world of mixed martial arts? It received a lot of attention and readers were fascinated with this slender young Asian woman who was once a ballerina now writing about mixed martial arts. Tell us more about this experience. I was following in the footsteps of my dad, doing my doctorate, on my way to be an academic. I had never studied creative writing. Then I had this strange thought, which was that I wouldn't follow the golden rule, which is, write what you know. I would do the inverse, and I would write what I didn't know. I would try to use the process of writing fiction as a way of learning about the world. I chose to write a very masculine novel, to write about the dynamic of a relationship between father and son. When I finished writing the book, I realised that although I had done vast amounts of research, what I had really been drawing from was not just all those hours of following fighters and going to matches and studying technique. What I was drawing on was actually my own childhood and adolescence as a classical ballet dancer, the incredibly tough physical regimen of dancing three to four hours every day. Trying to write about these men and writing about training, I was actually writing about myself and my own experiences. That was the first real lesson I learned about writing fiction, which is that you're always revealing yourself in some way. You're always drawing from your own experience, whether you like it or not. So no matter how far away from your own life you write, you always end up face to face with yourself. That was freeing and helped me to continue writing fiction. I wanted to ask you about your relationship with language. Your protagonists in A Separation and Intimacies are both translators. You also speak more than one language. For the first few years of my life, Japanese was the household language. When I was five, we spent a summer in Japan with my cousins, and everybody was speaking Japanese. When I came back to the United States, I forgot how to speak English. Soon after, when I started kindergarten, the school told my parents to stop speaking Japanese to me so that I would be able to catch up and learn English. It was a terrible mistake, and today I can see it as part of this ideological programming of assimilation. Over time, my Japanese slipped away. Today I can speak Japanese, but I cannot read with any ease, and I certainly cannot write in Japanese, which is a source of real sadness to me. But I think, in a funny way, it's something that has fed my fiction because the prose that I write is in some way haunted by another language. I'm very interested in trying to find syntax and forms of sentence structure that are perhaps outside the norm for English. I use a lot of comma splices, a lot of what would be called run-on sentences, which are not technically grammatically correct, but which wouldn't be so unusual in some other languages. There was also an experience that will be familiar to many second-generation children of immigrants. If you acquire fluency in the dominant language in a country, you're often called upon to speak English on behalf of the family. There was a period when I spoke English better than my parents, and I was the one who had to order the pizza or do whatever needed doing. I think that dynamic probably led to my interest in this question of interpretation, which I explored in Intimacies. In both Audition and Intimacies, we see multiple versions of competing narratives. What motivates you to create this kind of play? When I was a very young reader, I thought my assessment of what was happening in a book was objective. Now I understand that it varies wildly depending on where I am in my life—even where I am in my day. I realise how much of my own history and baggage is involved in interpretation. To be really honest, a book can seem much better when I've had a cup of coffee! The books that have moved me most over the course of my life are the ones that accommodate multiple readings. Take Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady—a brilliant book. When I was young, I thought it was a novel about a young woman's coming of age. Later, I saw it as a novel about the tremendous disappointment of life. It's both, of course. That mutability—how a text shifts depending on the reader—is something I wanted to explore actively in this book. That meant writing a book that felt airy, with a structure big enough for both me and the reader. I didn't want to write a book where the author knows all the answers and the 'right' reader has to guess them. I don't want that kind of relationship with my reader. I wanted the book to feel more like a collaboration. Audition, for instance, is what I call a rabbit–duck novel—you can look at it one way and see a rabbit, and another way and see a duck. Couples have come to book events and said, 'I thought it was this,' and their partner said, 'I thought it was that,' and asked which one it is. And of course, it's designed to be both. The Rabbit Duck novel How did the idea for Audition come to you? It started with a headline I saw: 'A stranger told me he was my son.' I didn't read the article—I assumed it would have a logical explanation, and that wasn't interesting to me. What fascinated me was the tension between 'stranger' and 'son.' I went for a walk with a friend of mine whose son was around 24, and I said, 'This headline preoccupies me, and I don't know why.' And she said, 'That's motherhood. Every time your child returns home, it's like a stranger has walked into the apartment.' That was really the feeling I carried into the book. We're conditioned to believe in total knowledge and intimacy between partners, and I was interested in exploring how even the most universal experiences—marriage, parenting—contain moments of profound strangeness and unfamiliarity. In A Separation, the narrator finds her husband a stranger. In Audition, it's the mother–son dynamic. And I always feel the period in which you're writing a book expresses itself in the book, even without any direct references. I wrote Audition during the pandemic, during that tension of sharing space again with people you love, having to recalibrate those relationships. That fed into the story. You are married to a fellow writer. Do you discuss each other's work? We're each other's first readers, and we want to come to the manuscript as fresh as possible. So we don't talk about our work while we're writing it. Because if I explain what I hope the novel is doing, then by the time he reads the first draft, he already knows—and he's no longer the ideal litmus-test reader. And you are all readers? It's the thing that ties our family together. At all moments, everybody would rather be reading. How did you raise your children to be readers? Our children are growing up surrounded by books, and they see us reading all the time. But it's not just that. Reading is a pleasure. Our children were always allowed to read whatever they wanted. If they asked for a book at the bookshop, we would get it. They took pride in accumulating books, just like us. We also let them find the books they wanted to read. When we've tried to give them the books we loved as children, they've resisted a bit—like when my husband gave our 12-year-old son the complete Terry Pratchett collection and said, 'You're going to love these.' He didn't. But when he finds a series on his own that feels like it belongs just to him, he devours it. As a child, I felt that reading was a private place where I could feel and know things that no one else in my family did. I try to respect that with my children. If they want to read something that feels completely their own, that's actually the best way to make reading a source of deep pleasure. A Separation is set in Greece, Intimacies in the Netherlands, and each setting feels like a character. Do you travel as a family to these places? What is the experience of travel like? I like to set my books internationally—except for Audition, which is set in New York. I'm drawn to characters who have just arrived somewhere and must figure out what it means to be there—whether in terms of behaviour, custom, or even ethics. I can't imagine life without travel, and I see my children organize their imaginations around it, too. Both Hari and I teach at New York University, which has campuses around the world—especially the one in Paris, where we teach every summer. Hari has family in India, and we took our son there when he was two. I have a family in Japan. So our children have the travel bug. Even though they're still little, they're great travellers. New places give them a sharpness of observation. And finally, tell us about your next book. It's a novel set in Rome, and it's about pleasure in a way my earlier books have not been. I did a fellowship in Rome, and we lived there for six months as a family. It's a complicated place, but one filled with many, many pleasures. Our book club conversation with Katie ends leaving us with much to think about. Like what parts of our lives are performance? Which version of ourselves is the 'real' one? And can anyone—ever—truly be known? These are just the kind of provocative questions that capture the problems of our age, thus giving Audition a well deserved place on the Booker Prize 2025 long list. (Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya's Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or reading dilemmas, write to her at sonyasbookbox@ The views expressed are personal)
New York Times
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Taylor Jenkins Reid Wants to Turn You On to Her Favorite Regency Romances
In an email interview, the best-selling writer explained why she aimed to 'chill out' after publishing 'Carrie Soto Is Back' in 2022. SCOTT HELLER What books are on your night stand? I'm listening to 'Audition,' by Katie Kitamura, reading 'Hungerstone,' by Kat Dunn, and next on deck are an advanced reader's copy of Emma Straub's new one, out next year, and Saumya Dave's 'The Guilt Pill.' Describe your ideal reading experience. On a patio, looking out over a body of water, with a great mystery or romance in front of me and at least one audiobook narrated by Julia Whelan ready to go. If there's an iced tea sweating on the table and a good place to put my feet up, all the better. I had this exact experience last summer, reading 'The God of the Woods,' by Liz Moore. Every moment was perfection. What kind of reader were you as a child? A reluctant one! I never read much as a kid. One of the first stories to change my mind about that was Edith Wharton's short story, 'Roman Fever.' We read it in Mrs. Hearn's 10th grade American Lit class and I remember getting to the ending a few seconds before the other students and gasping. I loved it. What's the last great book you read? 'The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,' by James McBride. Do you prefer books that reach you emotionally, or intellectually? I love a book that stays ahead of me the whole time. My brain is always working to figure out what might be coming next and I absolutely love being wrong. 'Mexican Gothic,' by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and 'The Mill House Murders,' by Yukito Ayatsuji, were both like that for me. Brilliant plots. Otherwise, give me a book that's going to break my heart and put it back together, please. Like something by Jasmine Guillory, Emily Henry, Celeste Ng or Ann Patchett. What's your favorite book no one else has heard of? I think plenty of people have heard of Sophie Irwin but many, many more people should. 'A Lady's Guide to Fortune-Hunting' and 'A Lady's Guide to Scandal' are some of my favorite Regency romances lately. And she has a new one, 'How to Lose a Lord in Ten Days,' coming out in July. How do you sign books for your fans? I made the mistake of having quite a long name so it's a bit of a scribble. But when I meet someone in person, I always love to spend a second talking to them, not just focused on signing. I want to make sure they know how much it means to me by saying hi and thanking them for coming. In what order should a newcomer to your work read the novels? In any order they want! I have a varied backlist, with different genres in there. I just appreciate when any one of my premises appeals to someone and they pick the book up. Can you recall the first time you were interested in space exploration? I think I've always been curious about weightlessness. Gravity is so foundational to the human experience on Earth that it blew my mind as a child that there was a place humans had made it to that didn't have gravity. But it wasn't until my research for this book that I became fascinated by the inner workings of NASA — teams of people who come together to achieve the nearly impossible. It's not without great risk, making it that much more impressive to me. I'm amazed by the courage and sacrifice of astronauts. Why did you want to foreground a love story between women in 'Atmosphere'? Because there are a lot of different sides to me and it felt like, creatively, it was time to indulge this one. And also, because no one is going to tell me that love isn't love. I wanted to write a big, bold sweeping love story. I think I wanted to break my own heart, a little bit. You worked in casting in Hollywood. What impact did that have on you as a novelist? I'm entirely focused on character first. I was when I worked in film — that's what drew me to casting in particular — and I am as a novelist. I always say that I don't really care what happens, I don't really care when it happens. I care who it happens to. Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Jay Gatsby. All the more because I'm not sure he fits certain definitions of the word. Your favorite antihero or villain? Daisy Buchanan, of course. For the same reason. You've talked a lot about the intensity of your ambition. Are you still intensely ambitious? And for what? This might be the biggest way I've changed since publishing last. 'Carrie Soto' taught me a lot. My goal, during my time away, was to chill out. And I think I've done that. There's no particular achievement I'm looking for here. I'm just trying to spin a good yarn. And it feels good.
Hindustan Times
18-05-2025
- General
- Hindustan Times
Literary Rehab: How to balance Life with Lit
Dear Reader, This is my week of non-reading. I've been forced into literary rehab. As someone who spends all their free time between the pages of a book, this is pure torture. The only times I haven't read were when I was forbidden to —maybe there were exams, or maybe my mother decreed I was straining my eyes too much. Even then, there were always inventive ways around the ban: reading a Five Find-Outers mystery between my science textbooks or reading Gone with the Wind under the sheets. But now, even I know it's time to stop reading. I've returned to Mumbai to a house filled with cartons that need unpacking, a desk cluttered with unpaid invoices, and chaos in every corner. I have a week to fix it all before leaving again. The writing is on the wall: I need to stop reading—even my to-be-read list. Sonya, don't look at Audition by Katie Kitamura, never mind that your book club is reading it. Or How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie, by your bedside after your girls recommended it as riveting. Or Fasting—no, you can't call it 'health research.' and pretend that's not reading. Sonya, read the writing on the wall. Stop Reading. My friends say, 'You read so much!' like it's a virtue. (The truth? I've long disguised my escapist addiction as self-improvement. My notebooks are plastered with lofty quotes: 'Reading fiction allows us to explore the depths of our own emotions, question the world around us' 'Readers are leaders,' etc. All true—but did those wise souls mean for me to neglect life entirely?) I skim from story to story, drunk on make-believe. Monday: Chinese spies in The Hidden Hand by Stella Rimington. Tuesday: Shanghai murder mysteries. Wednesday: Nigerian sci-fi in Death of the Author. Friday: House of Huawei. And on the weekend, real life scams in Empire of Pain and The Everything War. Sounds perfectly bookish I know. Except that at this point, between you and me, and strictly off the record - it's time to stop. My binge-reading has left me mired in a mountainous mess. And it's just a week of not reading—how bad could it be? Plus I've done it once before. Six years ago, following Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way program, I was forced to quit all reading as part of the course. For a whole week ! The first days were hell—what to do in queues, waiting rooms or winding down before bed? But slowly, I re-learned to play the piano, sketched, even tidied drawers. Shockingly, not reading had unexpected perks. Also Read | Book Box | Reading without rules Now on Day 1 of literary detox, I clear my desk, my cupboard and my hard drive. Afterwards, I slump onto my reading spot (red cushion, propped pillows) with no soothing prospect of a book before me. Instead I stare into space, at my walls full of bookshelves, and wonder: Did I always read this much? At 21, studying at IIM Calcutta, I barely touched novels—just MBA notes. Work life weekends in Mumbai revived my habit. Motherhood pared reading down to Saki and Maugham short stories, read in bits between baby cries. Now, with grown kids, I read 100+ books a year, and binge on book clubs. This week is different. With no books to gobble my attention, I discover life beyond the pages. I sit about more, I day dream. The girls and I go buy flowers, we go hunting for light fixtures. I make mango ice cream, egg sandwiches and homemade mustard. I write more. I start writing a screenplay. I also end up irritating my family ! Suddenly I am noticing all their little misdeeds and their messes. Go back to your murder mysteries, they beg me. As the week draws to a close, I am strangely content. This literary detox feels like a palate cleanser, like breathing in the scent of coffee beans between glasses of wine. I am more intentional and more mindful about my reading life. I shift away from the latest bestsellers and decide to begin a long planned project - re-reading old classics, beginning with The Brothers Karamazov. It feels like this break - even from a good habit - has sparked creativity in me, and given me more focus. Going back to reading is amazing - for reading is magic—it deepens our empathy, stretches our imagination, and connects us to lives we'll never live. But I realise there's another kind of magic too: unhurried conversations, homemade mustard, swimming with your daughters, noticing the shape of your day. The best stories aren't just the ones you read—they are also the ones you pause long enough to live. (Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya's Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or suggestions, write to her at sonyasbookbox@ The views expressed are personal.)
The Guardian
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Palestinian author Yasmin Zaher wins Dylan Thomas prize with ‘audacious' novel The Coin
A novel about a Palestinian woman who participates in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags has won this year's Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize. Palestinian journalist Yasmin Zaher took home the £20,000 prize – awarded to writers aged 39 or under in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age – for her debut novel The Coin. She was announced as the winner at a ceremony in Swansea, Thomas's birthplace. The Coin, chosen in a unanimous decision by judges, 'is a borderless novel, tackling trauma and grief with bold and poetic moments of quirkiness and humour', said writer and judging chair Namita Gokhale. 'It fizzes with electric energy', with Zaher bringing 'complexity and intensity to the page through her elegantly concise writing'. Born in 1991 in Jerusalem, Zaher studied biomedical engineering at Yale University and creative writing at the New School, where she was advised by the novelist Katie Kitamura. Kitamura described The Coin as a 'brilliant, audacious, powerhouse of a novel. A story of obsession and appetite, politics and class, it is deliciously unruly. An exceptional debut by an outrageous new talent.' The novel follows a wealthy Palestinian woman as she tries to set down roots in New York, teaching in a school for underprivileged boys. However, she begins to feel stifled in the US, and develops an obsession with cleanliness and purity. In an interview last July, Zaher said that she had 'very mixed feelings' about her novel coming out at this time. 'Publishing a novel is a dream come true for me, but the joy is muted by grief. Deep inside, I also know that current events are driving some of the interest in the book, and I feel very uncomfortable with that, because I never considered myself as speaking in the name of my people. 'But I tell myself that identity is not pure, that life is messy, and, maybe most importantly, that literature is at its best when it resists the boxes.' Rapture's Road by Seán Hewitt (Cape) Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (Fig Tree) The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Viking) I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson (Faber) Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good by Eley Williams (4th Estate) The Coin by Yasmin Zaher (Footnote) Other writers shortlisted for this year's prize were Rapture's Road by Seán Hewitt, Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon, The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson and Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good by Eley Williams. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Alongside Gokhale on the judging panel were the writer Jan Carson, poet Mary Jean Chan, critic Max Liu and academic Daniel Williams. Previous winners of the prize, launched in 2006, include Max Porter, Bryan Washington and Patricia Lockwood. Last year, Caleb Azumah Nelson won the award for his novel Small Worlds. 'Zaher is an extraordinary winner to mark 20 years of this vital prize,' said Gokhale.
Irish Times
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Audition by Katie Kitamura: This hotly anticipated novel is psychologically chilling
Audition Author : Katie Kitamura ISBN-13 : 978-1911717324 Publisher : Fern Press Guideline Price : £18.99 American author Katie Kitamura has acquired a reputation as something of a writer's writer – her work meditates on writing craft, interrogating the relationship between the ideas underpinning her work and the form of their delivery. Her previous novels have been well received; the most recent, Intimacies , was longlisted for the US National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and named by Barack Obama as one of his favourite books of 2021. As such, Audition , her fifth publication, has been hotly anticipated. This is Kitamura's third novel with an unreliable, unnamed first-person narrator – a point of view that allows the author to activate her great strength as a puppet-master of perspective and interpretation. The short novel is constructed in two parts; both are narrated by the same accomplished actor who is contemplating the roles she must play both on stage and off. In her current production she is challenged by a scene where the character undergoes a subtle transformation with little direction: 'the movement from the woman in grief to the woman of action'. This is echoed in the structure of the novel where between parts one and two the reader is thrust into a different dimension with no explanation. At the beginning of the novel, the actor is meeting an attractive young man, Xavier, for lunch when her husband happens upon them. The nature of their relationship, and the tense, unstable, dynamic between them, is psychologically riveting and propels the narrative forward. READ MORE In part two, Xavier has situated himself in an entirely different position in her life. The connective tissue between the two set pieces is the narrator's hypnotic unspooling of the narrative, but the world in which this novel is set is an abstract one, with little concrete detail to ground the reader. The degree to which that alienates or tantalises is a matter of taste. [ The 'other Americans': 20 books that celebrate US literature's rich diversity Opens in new window ] This is the third of Kitamura's novels where the theme of interpretation has been central to the narrative. Not least of all is the question of how people, and therefore her characters, interpret their own agency or lack thereof in their lives. It is interesting that both parts of this novel could be read in either order and provoke similar questions of interpretation and understanding. It would be miscategorising to position this novel as a psychological thriller, but it is nonetheless psychologically chilling. If you are drawn to novels that raise more questions than answers, this one is for you.
