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This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Ramnik.

Jennifer Wilson is a critic at The New Yorker, but one with a very wide purview.

She'll write about digital breakups or finding an apartment, as well as her latest obsession in the world of literature, which at the moment is a new book by Katie Kidamura.

Katie Kidamora's new novel audition is about a middle-aged actress living in New York City

who meets a much younger man, a playwright, and the two embark on a kind of undefined relationship that's mysterious to us as readers.

We have to kind of interpret for really long periods of the novel what's going on between them.

And, you know, it's set in the theater, and this is a novel about roles.

And this is also a character who's trying to figure out gender roles.

You know, what kind of figure should she be to this young man?

Is she a romantic interest?

Is she a maternal figure?

What are the appropriate gender roles for a woman, I think, is one of the things that probably drew Katie Kinemora to the theater for this most recent novel.

The New Yorker's Jennifer Wilson spoke with Katie Kinemora about audition, which comes out this week.

You know, this first scene in the novel kind of primes us to read the rest as being sort of about interpretation.

And, you know, it struck me that your last novel, the main character, was an interpreter.

So what is it about interpretation that's continuing to

inspire you or nag at you? I mean, I really wanted interpretation to be at the center of this

novel, in a funny way, even more than in my last novel, where the character is literally a

simultaneous interpreter. because I wanted

that feeling of interpretation to be very active for the reader as well. I wanted the reader

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