Ways to Disappear - Hardcover

Idra Novey is an award-winning poet and translator. Born in western Pennsylvania, she has since lived in Chile, Brazil, and New York. Her collection Exit, Civilian was selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series. She currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. This is her first novel.

"Idra Novey, an acclaimed poet and translator of Spanish and Portugese literature, has written a debut novel that's a fast-paced, beguilingly playful, noirish literary mystery with a translator at its center. Ways to Disappear explores the meaning behind a writer's words--the way they can both hide and reveal deep truths....Novey's novel delivers on its promises in so many ways. Yes, there's carnage, but there's also exuberant love, revelations of long-buried, unhappy secrets, ruminations about what makes a satisfying life, a publisher's regrets about moral compromises in both his work and his use of his family wealth and connections, and an alternately heartfelt and wry portrait of the satisfactions and anxieties of the generally underappreciated art of translation....Ways to Disappear is concerned not just with truth and the risks of its misplacement and misinterpretation, but with the importance of close reading. It's a delightful, inventive paean to writing that generates 'real emotion' and 'genuine unease.' At one point Beatriz's publisher likens literature to steaks on a grill, testing both 'for density' as well as 'for something tender in the middle yet still heavy enough to blacken the air.' This book is seared to perfection."
―Heller McAlpin, NPR

"[An] elegant page-turner....Novey writes with cool precision and breakneck pacing....This lush and tightly woven novel manages to be a meditation on all forms of translation while still charging forward with the momentum of a bullet."―Catherine Lacey, New York Times Book Review

"[A] seductive mystery....Novey, a poet and translator, brings to her first novel a zesty comic touch and refreshing insights into the delicate processes of writing and translation."―Jane Ciabattari, BBC

"Bewitching....A tale of playful suspense that ingeniously transmutes into a profound meditation on language and love."―Elliott Holt, O, The Oprah Magazine

"Exhilarating....Sly, lovely writing.... In Raquel, Beatriz's hard-bitten daughter, [Novey] has created a heart-rending portrait of the price someone always ends up paying for genius. A writer to watch."
―Charles Finch, USA Today


"Novey's elegant, comic debut....a novel whose power of enchantment rival those of its fictional author."―Anita Felicelli, San Francisco Chronicle

"[Novey] sustains suspense throughout with beautifully restrained prose."―Carmela Ciuraru, New York Times

"Reminiscent of a Coen brothers movie....[a] spare, witty riddle of a novel."―Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"Novey - poet, translator, and now novelist - has created something special with the brisk, beautiful Ways to Disappear, a book that blooms in the spaces between languages, between continents, between selves past and present."―Dustin Illingworth, Los Angeles Times


"[A] delightful debut....[moments] resonate in clever, often haunting, ways."―Katherine Hill, Philadelphia Inquirer