Favourite
Orlando
Virginia Woolf · 1928
A being wanders through four centuries, changing sex along the way: the playful fantasy that shattered assigned roles long before its time.
Read in echo, in our stories: L'aller simple
The library
A feminist shelf to carry the stories further. Classics that broke the trail, alongside today’s voices. To read, to give, to pass on.
Jump to a shelf
Novels
Stories where women unfold in full, from the classic that broke the trail to today’s fiction.
Favourite
Baise-moi
Virginie Despentes · 1993
Two women take to the road and answer violence with violence. A punk, head-on novel that refuses the victim’s role.
Favourite
Hexes
Agnieszka Szpila
An overflowing eco-feminist saga where motherhood and women’s rage become a telluric force. From Poland, furious and alive.
A Frozen Woman
Annie Ernaux · 1981 · Gallimard
The slow freezing of a lively woman that marriage and motherhood gradually put in her place. Ernaux dissects the domestic obvious.
Read in echo, in our stories: Le repas de famille
Essays & Manifestos
The foundational texts that gave words to what had none, from the incendiary manifesto to founding theory.
Favourite
SCUM Manifesto
Valerie Solanas · 1967
The most incendiary pamphlet of feminism: outrageous, funny, radical. A cry that has lost none of its edge.
King Kong Theory
Virginie Despentes · 2006 · Grasset
A furious, lucid manifesto that refuses the boxes of the feminine. Short, funny, still incandescent.
A Room of One’s Own
Virginia Woolf · 1929
To write, a woman needs money and a room of her own. The founding essay on the material conditions of creation.
The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir · 1949 · Gallimard
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. The matrix text that gave modern feminism its words.
Society
For thinking through what women’s lives reveal about the world: love, work, the body, norms and the stories we are told.
Favourite
Reinventing Love
Mona Chollet · 2021 · Zones
How heterosexual love harms women, and how to imagine it otherwise. Chollet dismantles the grand romantic narrative.
Read in echo, in our stories: Le repas de famille
Favourite
C’est parce que t’es pas encore tombée sur le bon
Marie Kirschen
A look at the pressures placed on women’s singlehood, and at the freedom of shaking them off.
In Defence of Witches
Mona Chollet · 2018 · Zones
The figure of the witch reread as that of the independent women the patriarchy wanted to burn. An essay turned cult.
Beauté fatale
Mona Chollet · 2012 · Zones
An anatomy of “femininity” as a full-time job: fashion, the body, injunctions. A critique as precise as it is delightful.
Body & Desire
The body and pleasure reclaimed in the first person, where women write their own desire.
Favourite
Delta of Venus
Anaïs Nin · 1977
Erotic stories written by a woman reclaiming desire as her own. Anaïs Nin, without detour.
Favourite
La chair est triste hélas
Ovidie · 2023 · Julliard
After twenty years filming sex, Ovidie chooses abstinence and asks what heterosexuality costs women.
Read in echo, in our stories: L'aller simple
Jouissance Club
Jüne Plã · 2020 · Marabout
A joyful, illustrated cartography of pleasure that puts women’s desire back at the centre. A guide turned phenomenon.
Memoirs & Autobiographies
Lives told in the first person, where the intimate becomes political.
A Woman’s Story
Annie Ernaux · 1987 · Gallimard
At her mother’s death, Ernaux writes her life as a woman and a working-class daughter. Transmission, caught exactly.
A Girl’s Story
Annie Ernaux · 2016 · Gallimard
Ernaux returns to the eighteen-year-old girl she was, and to learned shame. The intimate becomes inquiry.
Consent
Vanessa Springora · 2020 · Grasset
The account of coercion suffered at fourteen from a famous writer. A book that shifted the gaze, and the law.
Comics & Graphic Novels
When drawing tells stories as well as words can: illustrated lives and rage set in panels.
Favourite
Anaïs Nin: A Sea of Lies
Léonie Bischoff · 2020 · Casterman
The life of Anaïs Nin in colour and desire, carried by sumptuous artwork. The freedom of a woman inventing herself.
Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World
Pénélope Bagieu · 2016 · Gallimard
Fifteen portraits of women who did what they wanted with their lives. Funny, quick, contagious.
The Mental Load
Emma · 2017 · Massot Éditions
The “mental load” set in panels: the comic that gave a name to what so many women carried in silence.
Poetry
Voices that distill rage, survival and desire into a few lines.
Milk and Honey
Rupi Kaur · 2014
Short poems on survival, love and healing that became a global phenomenon. The pain, and the way out.
Ariel
Sylvia Plath · 1965
Sylvia Plath’s last poems: a raw, incandescent language at the edge of the abyss and of rage.
This library grows with our reading. A book to suggest? Write to us and we’ll gladly add it.
