Who Are We, Really?

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 Atla...
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