Paperback Edition
ISBN: 9781558610842
Publication date: 11-01-1994

Translated by Johanna Steigleder Moore, Beth E. Weckmueller, Johanna Alberti, and Tobe Levin
Afterword by Tobe Levin
 

Sometimes called the feminist equivalent to Mao’s "little red book," Shedding and Literally Dreaming narrates the transformation of a young woman’s consciousness against the background of the rising women’s movement of the early 1970s. Over 300,000 copies have been sold in Germany since 1975.

Shedding, a collection of eight stories written a decade later, portrays women living together in rural settings, independent of men. The autobiographical essay “Euphoria and Cacophony” traces the extraordinary reception and backlash that greeted Shedding and Stefan’s emergence as a writer and a symbol of the German women’s movement.

In resonant prose, and with a refreshing honesty, Stefan speaks to the universality of women's lives, a concept popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Stefan was a pioneer in "experimental writing" before the phrase was coined, and her writing about women's lives is as immediate today as when it first exploded on the German literary scene.

"The touchstone of the German women's movement and an international literary classic." —Jane Marcus, Distinguished English professor at the City University of New York

"Lovingly, beautifully, Verena Stefan renders the world as a complex, painful, and lovely place: new again, vibrant, filled with possibility—as she walks ' in among the trees as in among the letters.' Reading this work is like coming 'unexpectedly out of winter into the cascade of greening birches'—thrilling." —Carole Maso, author of The American Woman in the Chinese Hat

"In the tradition of writers like Monique Wittig and Adrienne Rich, Verena Stefan's writing is a form of feminist activism, the construction—in language—of an emergent world in which the present bears the seeds of the not yet possible. Stefan seduces us into imaginatively entering such a world; she challenges us to act on the needs that made this seduction possible." —Angelika Bammer, associate professor of German studies and comparative literature, Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts, Emory University