Maison Femme: a fiction
Published by Bon Aire Projects
This is a novella about two women who run a small, nonprofit literary press out of their basement. Using the model of the home to create the book’s structure, Maison Femme includes a text and an image for each space in the publishing house. Each text section includes as many sentences as Carmody’s foot measurement of the length and width (l+w) of the corresponding physical space (pace Perec). Each section also refers to a chance-determined entry in The Literature of Lesbianism, edited by Terry Castle.
Teresa Carmody wrote the text; Vanessa Place generated images. Place and Carmody are also the co-founding directors of Les Figues Press, housed in their Los Angeles basement.
This is the third book in Bon Aire Projects’ LOVE/LOVERS/LOVING series.
"Marie and Louise summon writers living and dead to a domestic temple whose rituals of measurement and gossip conflate time and space in a productive fashion—more books, more writers communing on the library shelf and harvesting more gossip in the parlor. Measurement and gossip support the mythology these lovers confect to explain the lesbian miracle of themselves to themselves and to others. The House is a Book. We become our favorite writers by sheltering them in our psychic square footage, so the friendly hauntings in this book are almost as real as the party on the back deck, the spectacle of paradise. Wait a minute—I was at that party, and so were you!"
—Robert Glück, author of Jack the Modernist
“Maison Femme: a fiction is an experimental text in the rich tradition of experimental writing that Les Figues Press, the self-professed love child of the two authors, supports. Unlike many texts on the Les Figues press roster, however, Maison Femme can be enjoyed without being in on the joke of knowing the constraint. The book functions independently of its constraint as a piece of ladylike literature in the tradition of Virginia Woolf or Gertrude Stein, both of whom are referenced herein. This book knows its sources.”
–Fanzine