May 14th6:30pm
Writing is an “apprenticeship to what can never fully be mastered”, says the Pulitzer-winning poet Carl Phillips. Join us as we delve into the mysteries of the art of storytelling. In this workshop-adjacent book club, we will discuss everything from plot beats to perspective choices to sentence-level sonics of major literary works and small press gems, in an attempt to understand how specific authorial choices shape the experience and impact of a story. You do not have to be a writer to join us — just someone with a deep love for literature and endless curiosity about how a story gets told.
This month we'll discuss Katie Kitamura's exhilarating, destabilizing, Möbius strip of a novel, that asks whether we ever really know the people we love, Audition.
"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
Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? 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.
Taut and hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.
Contact Genay, at bookclubs@mcnallyjackson.com with any questions.
Reserve your place with a $5 voucher, redeemable on the night of the book club meeting on any product in store.