Endpapers
The author of more than a dozen novels written across five decades, Jonathan Strong has long ruminated on the passing of time in relation to our experiences of youth and of aging. In Endpapers, he brings these themes together, face to face, in the characters of two short novels, Discourses, with Donkey and Playful and Thoughtful.
Here, youth and age come into close contact and understanding, even while made to cope with the concerns of a larger world: from global pandemic to local gentrification; from impending political and natural disasters, to ruinous events already well underway. To wit, one character prompts us to wonder “if we’re coming to think of our pasts as still happening, even when we’re awake. Maybe decline is a process of mixing up time, past and present, of seeing our lives simultaneously as a whole thing.”
“Nobody would think now to call Strong a voice of any generation, if only because time has shown him to be equally concerned with each one as it comes and goes, and even his early books, in retrospect, are most noteworthy for how the direct rendering of young people’s voices is everywhere haunted by disconsolate premonitions of what it might mean to be old—by a powerful sense of what age is and how it shadows the lives even of those inclined to think about it least.”
About the Author
Jonathan Strong is the author of seventeen previous novels including, most recently, Four Last Songs (Grid Books 2020) and Quit the Race (Pressed Wafer 2017). His first story was published in the Partisan Review in 1966 and his first collection, Tike and Five Stories (reissued as The Haunts of His Youth) won the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1969. Subsequent works were brought out by Ballantine Books, Zoland Books, and Quale Press (most recently The Judge’s House in 2015). He lives in Rockport, Massachusetts, and Corinth, Vermont.
