Endpapers

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Its 2003, and artist Dawn Levit is stuck. A bookbinder who works in conservation at the Met, she spends her free time scouting the citys street art, hoping something might spark inspiration. Instead, everything looks like a dead end. And art isnt the only thing that feels wrong: wherever she turns, her gender identity clashes with the rest of her life. Her relationship, once anchored by shared queerness, is falling apart as her boyfriend Lukas increasingly seems to be attracted to Dawn only when shes at her most masculine. Meanwhile at work, Dawn has to present as female, even on the days when that isnt true. Either way, her difference feels like a liability.

Then, one day at work, Dawn finds something hidden behind the endpaper of an old book: the torn-off cover of a 50s lesbian pulp novel, Turn Her About. On the front is a campy illustration of a woman looking into a handheld mirror and seeing a mans face. And on the back is a love letter.

Dawn latches onto the coincidence, becoming obsessed with tracking down the notes author. Her fixation only increases when her best friend Jae is injured in a hate crime, for which Dawn feels responsible. As Dawn searches for the letters author, she is also looking for herself. She tries to understand how to live in a world that doesnt see her as she truly is, how to get unstuck in her gender, and how to rediscover her art, and she cant shake the feeling that the notes author might be able to help guide her to the answers.

A sharply written, deeply evocative story about what it means to live authenticallyeven within an identity whose parameters have not yet been definedEndpapers will appeal to readers of queer, nonbinary, or trans fiction like Torrey Peters Detransition, Baby as well as anyone who loves character-driven, setting-rich stories like Tell the Wolves Im Home or The Immortalists.

Reviews

Sometimes the hardest thing to beis our authentic selves. How do we do that when society has hidden and erased any path that could show us the way Dawn Levit finds that heroic path by believing in hunches and looking for clues. Not quite a mystery novel, this is a story of following ones own inner desire for belonging through art and surprising friendships. Savran Kelly creates a story full of humans who we long to be friends with after the last page is read. Love is acceptance, and this book is that and more.
Amy Wallen, author of When We Were Ghouls

"Part portrait of the artist, part queer coming-of-age, and part investigative puzzle, this intimate, emotional novel parlays romance, passion, politics, and history into a compelling tale, beautifully and insightfully told. Jennifer Savran Kelly is an exciting, empathetic new voice.
J. Robert Lennon, author of Subdivision and Let Me Think

Endpapers is a richly imagined and moving novel about identity, desire, and art. Its characters are believable and engaging, its plot intriguing, but just as important is its urgent subtext, a plea for humans to break free from constricting labels and instead behold each other in all their thorny, unpredictable individuality; to love complexity and uncertainty, rather than ideology and order. This just might be the most urgent issue of our time, and Endpapers tackles it with energy andthat most apropos weaponsubtlety.
Brian Hall, author of The Stone Loves the World

Jennifer Savran Kellys Endpapers immerses us in the world and mind of her engaging but struggling narrator Dawngenderqueer, Jewish, a book conservator on a desperate search for queer role models and an artistic community. Endpapers is about the need to be fully seento locate oneself in the past in order to feel visible in the present. Savran Kelly is a masterful and compassionate storyteller, one who finds hope in the antidotes to hate and violence: community, art, authentic self. This is a book for all of us!
Lori Ostlund, author of After the Parade

"A mystery wrapped in a love story wrapped in an artists coming of age, Endpapers is an ode to queer joy and the messiness of selfhood. With tenderness and insight, Jennifer Savran Kelly explores what we lose when we keep our innermost selves hiddenand what it means to forge an authentic life through art."
Antonia Angress, author of Sirens Muses

Jennifer Savran Kellys Endpapers is the most personal novel about life as a gender-nonconforming person that Ive ever read. It opens a window into what its like to live in a world where you need to disguise who you are just to get along, and yet, at its heart, it remains an abundantly hopeful story. It's a story full of messy, true life. Im so glad I read it.
Claire Oshetsky, author of Chouette

Achingly evocative and thoroughly satisfying, Jennifer Savran Kellys Endpapers follows a genderqueer bookbinder through post-9/11 New York as she searches the city for answers about a long-hidden love letter and the outlines of her own identity. Part historical mystery, part meditation on the shifting nature of creativity and self, Endpapers is a story that bursts with warmth, community, and the sometimes-heartbreaking decisions we make when we begin to stitch together the spine of our lives."
Katy Hays, author of The Cloisters

Jennifer Savran Kellys Endpapers is an accomplished, moving novel where the search for answers to a literary mystery doubles as the search for queer authenticity in a world of bindings: book bindings, artistic bindings, social bindings. With humor, tenderness, and honesty, Savran Kelly lays bare the struggle to find our brilliant, beautiful selvesand the courage to go forth boldly with them.
Zak Salih, author of Lets Get Back to the Party

the mystery of Gertrude and Marta converges beautifully with the art-work that Dawn begins to conceive. Kelly is a bookbinder and book production editor, and the novels details of book and print restoration ground and add depth to Dawns story.
BookPage
a dizzying, intimate mystery, an exploration of how we become engrossed in the stories of others in order to tell ones of ourselves.Electric Literature
Adizzying, intimate mystery, an exploration of how we become engrossed in the stories of others in order to tell ones of ourselves.Electric Literature
Its thoughtful and nuanced and full of gender exploration we rarely get to seeLGBTQ Reads

Author Bio

Jennifer Savran Kelly (she/her/they/them) lives in Ithaca, New York, where she writes, binds books, and works as a production editor at Cornell University Press.Endpapersis her debut novel. In 2018 it won a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. In 2019 it was selected as a finalist for the SFWP Literary Awards program and for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. Her short fiction has appeared inHobart, Black Warrior Review, Green Mountains Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts(Online Companion), andelsewhere.In 2014, she was selected to study in the Writer to Writer Mentorship Program of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.