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.