Greasepaint

Nylon's Most Anticipated Books of 2024The Paris Review's Favorite Books of 2023Set against a backdrop of 1950s New York, this experimental novel follows an ensemble cast of all-singing, all-dancing butch dykes and Yiddish anarchists through eternal Friday nights, around the table, and at the bar. In one of many bars, Frankie Gold sings while Sammy Silver plays piano after a day job at the anarchist newspaper. The Butch Piano Players Union meets in the corner next to the jukebox. Laur smokes on the back steps, sweaty thigh to thigh with Vic. Frankie's childhood sweetheart, Lily, turns up at yet another bar to see a second Sammy play every Friday night. And before all that, there's always dinner at Marg's. Fabulated out of oral histories, anthologies, as well as the fiction of the butch-femme bar scene and Yiddish anarchist tradition, Greasepaint is a rollicking whirlwind of music and politics--the currents of community embodied and held inside the bar.

About the Author :
Hannah Levene lives in Norfolk, UK. Recent poems have been published by -algia, Spam, Blackbox Manifold, amongst others. Her poetry pamphlet Boneless Ribs was published in 2018 with Lost Alphabet. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Roehampton University focusing on the composition of new butch literature. Greasepaint is her debut novel.

Review :
"a joyously eccentric portrait of a community of lesbian musicians in fifties NYC, often told in long stretches of quickfire conversation." --Amanda Gersten, The Paris Review's Favorite Books of 2023 "While smoking together outside on the bar's back doorsteps, the friends discuss community, sex, desire, masculinity, their broken homophobic families, and the longing for a loving relationship... This heartfelt ode to 1950s lesbian social culture is worth a look." --Publishers Weekly "Greasepaint stages a butch past that feels like it should be a future; and a version of New York that should be a galaxy. What's more, the novel lends itself to playing 'pick your favourite character' with your gay friends like it were a boy band; and yet, it sings better. Levene is a talent to reckon with." --Isabel Waidner"New York finally has its Nightwood - or more Nightchrome, a dazzling, finger-snapping hymn to bar butches in black jeans and leather jackets with anarchist newsletters tucked in their back pockets. Greasepaint will WOW you with its catchy attunement to the complex popping rhythms of performing our rainbowed genders in a world that sees in monochrome, singing the songs we make ours by how we say 'baby, ' to our own selves keeping kosher even when we've had to leave. If you've ever longed to eat a pink, pink Reuben while critiquing Gershwin's racial appropriations, with Greasepaint, baby, you're home." --So Mayer "Reading Greasepaint is like entering an old school dyke bar: the dark swirl of conversation, jokes, sass, anarchists, communists, butches and more butches. Turns of phrase have a sexy glint and a little strut. "Harry made the girls melt like tears into a pillow." And what about Vic? She's so butch the steak is hard to swallow. This isn't a sentimental book. The oppression is severe. One character reflects, maybe she's dead and this is hell, though sometimes it feels like heaven. I'm left with a sexy glee and sheer vitality blasted from the past. It's absolutely refreshing." --Camille Roy