The August Rumpus Book Club Selection: “Audition” by Katie Kitamura

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August 10, 2026

Our third installment of the relaunch The Rumpus Book Club* will be on August 25 at 2pm ET. Host Debbie Millman will be speaking with Katie Kitamura about her multi-award winning novel Audition.

Audition was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. It was also a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the Gotham Book Prize, longlisted for the Women’s Prize, Carol Shields Prize and the Grand Prix des Lectrices ELLE, and was one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2025.

Debbie will be speaking with Katie for 45 minutes and then will open up the conversation to include questions from the audience.

Katie Kitamura’s work has been translated into 28 languages and is being adapted for film and television. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature, the Berlin Prize and a Cullman Center Fellowship. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

Please register here and join us on August 25th at 2pm ET.

*PSA: There have been some scam e-mails purportedly sent from The Rumpus, soliciting authors for our book club for a fee. Please disregard these e-mails. Official Rumpus e-mails will always come from therumpus.net, from a senior editor on our official masthead, and we do not charge authors to be featured in our book club. Money flows to the writer. Never forget!

BSKY

Debbie Millman, Roxane Gay

Debbie Millman: Named “one of the most creative people in business” by Fast Company, and “one of the most influential designers working today” by Graphic Design USA, Debbie Millman has built a remarkable career at the intersection of design, storytelling, and cultural commentary. For the past 22 years, she has hosted the award-winning podcast Design Matters, where she has interviewed more than 700 creative luminaries. Debbie is also the author of eight books. Her most recent book, Love Letter to a Garden, was published in 2025.

Roxane Gay: Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, Difficult Women, Hunger, Opinions, and others. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. Roxane was the founding Essays Editor for The Rumpus and is now the site editor and co-owner. You can find her at roxanegay.com.