Mystery Meetup
A mysterious lunch meeting at a restaurant in the financial district between a middle-aged actress and a handsome, much younger man opens the story of Katie Kitamura’s novel Audition (Riverhead Books, 2025). The reader is momentarily left in the dark as the unnamed first-person narrator recounts this lunchtime assignation and it’s not until the third chapter of the book that the details and reasons for their initial meeting come to light. Start a new short story in which two characters meet and the nature of their connection is kept ambiguous. Are they friends, lovers, family, colleagues, or something else? How can you use shifting points of view and dialogue to maintain an atmosphere of suspense and inscrutability?