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TAKE WHAT YOU NEED by Idra Novey

Submitted by mcutler on Fri, 2023-03-17 20:44
Posted on March 17, 2023 in
TAKE WHAT YOU NEED by Idra Novey
TAKE WHAT YOU NEED by Idra Novey received fantastic publication-week reviews from The Boston Globe (“As in the classic, unscrubbed fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, Idra Novey’s TAKE WHAT YOU NEED does not skirt gritty subjects. Concerned with characters who fall outside easily defined categories, it tackles big questions — like what qualifies as art — as well as the aching human need to be seen…With these raw materials, Novey has fashioned an insightful work of art about art”), The New York Times (“[An] impressive new novel…TAKE WHAT YOU NEED never feels like a parable. It’s a story about complicated relationships unresolved by death, about ambivalent grief. It’s very much a book for grown-ups in that there are no neat solutions to messy relationships”), The Los Angeles Times (“[An] elegiac and unsettling new novel…The best fiction can explore such dilemmas more meaningfully than a thousand think pieces. Rather than present this choice as an empty intellectual exercise about ‘tolerance,’ Novey takes readers to the limbic level, that instinctual site of emotions and stress hormones”), The Washington Post (“[S]triking…Novey’s prose [is] brisk and direct”), and The Jewish Book Council (“[A] moving, meditative novel…[A] complicated and loving portrait that readers will remember long after they’ve turned the last page”). Novey was profiled in Belt Mag, The Rumpus, and Littsburgh, and featured on the "So Many Damn Books" podcast. The novel was also included in must-read round-ups from The New York Times, The Millions, and Lit Hub. Viking published the novel on March 14, 2023.