Poets & Writers Theater

In this installment of the Creative Writing and Critical Thought series, novelist Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies (Riverhead, 2021), speaks with professor Emily Apter, author of Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (Verso Books, 2013), about the complexity and consequences of translation and the paradoxes and power of language. The series is cosponsored by New Literary History and the Center for Fiction.

Watch the “first, the greatest, and possibly the last” Riverhead Variety Show hosted by Traci Thomas and starring Kristen Arnett, Katie Kitamura, Chang-rae Lee, Brandon Taylor, and Joanne Tompkins, as they speak about their new books and invite viewers into their refrigerators and closets.

“Just keep going.” In this video from the 2017 Bay Area Book Festival, Literary Hub senior editor Emily Temple speaks to authors, including Michael Chabon, Vanessa Hua, Katie Kitamura, Paul Murray, Hannah Tinti, Ayelet Waldman, and Esmé Weijun Wang, about the best writing advice they have ever received.

“The idea was to use a kind of fragmented approach to talking about colonialism...because I think that’s increasingly the way we think about and access historical narratives.” In this video, Katie Kitamura talks about the structural choices behind her second novel, Gone to the Forest (Free Press, 2012). Kitamura’s most recent novel, A Separation (Riverhead Books, 2017), tells the story of the end of a marriage and a husband gone missing in Greece.

In this Politics and Prose Bookstore event, Katie Kitamura talks about how a newspaper headline about a woman meeting her estranged son inspired her to write her latest novel, Audition (Riverhead Books, 2025), in a conversation with Kat Chow.

This clip presents one element in the making of the cover of Katie Kitamura’s debut novel, The Longshot (Free Press, 2009), which features a photo of the tattooed knuckles of the author’s brother, whose background in mixed martial arts was an inspiration for the subject of the novel. Kitamura’s latest novel, A Separation, is out now by Riverhead Books.