Author: Hannah Levene
Publisher: Nightboat
Paperback
One of our books of the year 2024!
Enya says: Greasepaint follows a cast of butch lesbians, gender queer Jazz musicians and Yiddish anarchists through the 1950s New York queer scene. They forge an underground community of lost souls trying to navigate their dreams, politics and desires out in the big city. It reads like a play or a boozy and choppy set of nights out that flash back in murky vignettes. What I love the most about the book is occupies an imperfect and embodied anarchist politics outside mainstream understandings of an anarchist politics (the bros!!). It’s choppy, hazy and uncertain with the characters constantly feeling out things as they go, act and speak. This commitment to feeling things and figuring them as they go is boughed by their love for one another, for a better world, and fierce attachments to each other. Ultimately, it’s fun: full of jazz, dancing, eating late out together at Marg’s deli, fucking and drinking.