Greasepaint

Nylon's Most Anticipated Books of 2024 The Paris Reviews Favorite Books of 2023 Set 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. Frankies childhood sweetheart, Lily, turns up at yet another bar to see a second Sammy play every Friday night. And before all that, theres always dinner at Margs. 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 politicsthe currents of community embodied and held inside the bar.