Synopses & Reviews
A queer book conservator finds a mysterious old love letter, setting off a search for the author who wrote it and for a meaningful life beyond the binary in early-2000s New York City.
It's 2003, and artist Dawn Levit is stuck. A bookbinder who works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she spends all day repairing old books but hasn't created anything of her own in years. What's more, although she doesn't have a word for it yet, Dawn is genderqueer, and with a partner who wishes she were a man and a society that wants her to be a woman, she's struggling to feel safe expressing herself. Dawn spends her free time scouting the city's street art, hoping to find the inspiration that will break her artistic block — and time is of the essence, because she's making her major gallery debut in six weeks and doesn't have anything to show yet.
One day at work, Dawn discovers something hidden under the endpapers of an old book: the torn-off cover of a lesbian pulp novel from the 1950s, with an illustration of a woman looking into a mirror and seeing a man's face. Even more intriguing is the queer love letter written on the back. Dawn becomes obsessed with tracking down the author of the letter, convinced the mysterious writer can help her find her place in the world. Her fixation only increases when her best friend, Jae, is injured in a hate crime for which Dawn feels responsible. But ultimately for Dawn, the trickiest puzzle to solve is how she truly wants to live her life.
A sharply written, page-turning, and evocative debut, Endpapers is an unforgettable story about the journey toward authenticity and the hard conversations we owe ourselves in pursuit of a world where no one has to hide.
Review
"It's thoughtful and nuanced and full of gender exploration we rarely get to see..." LGBTQ Reads
Review
"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
Review
"...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 novel's details of book and print restoration ground and add depth to Dawn's story." BookPage
About the Author
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. Endpapers is 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 in Hobart, Black Warrior Review, Green Mountains Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, and elsewhere. In 2014, she was selected to study in the Writer to Writer Mentorship Program of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.