Shedding and Literally Dreaming

Sometimes called the feminist equivalent to Mao's "little red book," Shedding 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 and Literally Dreaming, 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, and ripe for re-discussion now in the 1990s. 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.