Librairie-café Violette and Co
52 Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, 75011 Paris, France

Violette and Co. is a feminist, lesbian, and LGBTQIA+ bookshop and café with a thriving programme of literary events and salons. The bookshop is named after the French lesbian writer Violette Leduc.

Violette Leduc was born in Arras in 1907, the illegitimate child of a servant girl. Sent to boarding school before the First World War, Violette was later expelled upon the discovery of her love affair with both another female pupil and her music teacher. During the Second World War she published her memoir, La Bâtarde, which scandalized the literary world with its explicit account of lesbian love, sold 150,000 copies in its first year, and earned her the acclaim of Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre and Camus. In 2013 a film was made of her life, Violette. She died in 1972.

The Lady and the Little Fox Fur is an existential feminist classic about an old woman who lives alone in a tiny attic flat in Paris, where she counts out coffee beans every morning beneath the roar of the overhead metro. Starving, she spends her days walking around the city, each step a bid for recognition of her own existence. She rides crowded metro carriages to feel the warmth of other bodies, and watches the hot batter of pancakes drip from the hands of street-sellers. The Lady and the Little Fox Fur is a stunning portrait of Paris, of the invisibility we all feel in a big city, and ultimately of the hope and triumph of a woman who reclaims her place in the world.