Idra Novey discusses the first pages of her third novel, Take What You Need, how she developed a front and back story to create tension and complexity, her love of place, the power of her descriptive details, the familial relationships that tie us emotionally to her story, and how she handled going between two timelines.
Novey’s first pages can be found here.
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Idra Novey's most recent novel Take What You Need was named a spring fiction pick with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Take What You Need was a 2023 selection for CBS Talk Pittsburgh and NPR's Nerdette Book Club. She is also the author of Those Who Knew, a finalist for the 2019 Clark Fiction Prize, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a Best Book of the Year in over a dozen media outlets, including NPR, Esquire, BBC, Kirkus Review, and O Magazine. Her first novel Ways to Disappear, received the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize, the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Prize, and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her poetry collections include Exit, Civilian, selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series, The Next Country, a finalist for the 2008 Foreword Book of the Year Award, and Clarice: The Visitor, a collaboration with the artist Erica Baum. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers Magazine, the PEN Translation Fund, and the Poetry Foundation.Her works as a translator include Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. and a co-translation with Ahmad Nadalizadeh of Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, Lean Against This Late Hour, a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Prize in 2021. She teaches fiction at Princeton University.
Passages: Idra Novey on Take What You Need