Greasepaint

"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

"In Greasepaint (Nightboat Books), Hannah Levene’s debut novel, sentences unfold like songs and intellectual rapport becomes a process of collective music-making. Immersed in the bars of 1950s New York, the novel follows the cadences of a cast of butch dykes and Yiddish anarchists as they perform, debate, flirt, and organize. . . On dancefloors and in delis, at meetings of the Butch Piano Players Union and over dinner, the characters improvise their way toward one another (or toward the revolution, or at least toward another Friday night)." —Emma Cohen, BOMB

"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

“Butchness is also about transcending the body on some level, redefining as the individual sees fit for their own gender presentation and performance. Turning the relentless awareness of one’s own body into a tool rather than a hindrance… It’s exciting to experience such a frank, queer gaze on the page—that which is interested in affirming the individual rather than defining it.”—West Trade Review, Max Parker

"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

"The prose hums and sings, running on the juice of an endless succession of similes. Words don’t resolve, don’t make definite. They are provisional, shifting, a piano riff; they offer a blush of pleasure, a spot for two humans to meet and understand something, even as they know the spot is not perfect, never will be. Levene’s characters flirt, make each other laugh, and it’s in the semantic collisions that happen inside words that the novel cozies up with its larger questions. 

Greasepaint is a book about how one manages to build a life in spite of marginalization and threatened violence. Because—on we go. Levene’s shambling, butch, melodic prose wears its melancholy and tenderness and resignation and humor lightly. Her characters envision a just world."—Agnes Borinsky, The Anarchist Review of Books