Hannah Levene

An electric, smart, and boldly playful novel exploring queer suburbia and the radical implications of staying put.

Herb and Lara are busy slinging coffees in their hometown – of Watford! While Herb dreams of leaving to write big gay plays for a big gay world, Lara’s dedication to being in the here and now keeps her firmly rooted. Plus she’s fallen madly in love with Cynthia, a high-femme roboteer here to finish her PhD, teaching her way through robot post-doc hell, stamping on the brains of robo-boys as she goes. Soon Watford will use Cynthia’s inventions to reinvent itself into the communised Watford Underburg, but not yet.

Meanwhile, Lazarus is back at her mum’s. Her attempt at city life didn’t exactly go to plan, and now she spends her days working on a Yiddish translation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and playing video games. With no capacity to think about her future and trying to forget her past, what will happen? Local football coach Butch Lichenstein, that’s what.

A Pizza Hut, A Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut is a wildly inventive and funny novel that counters the idea of the suburbs as a place queers leave and plays out the radical implications of staying put.

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. 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.