Published in 2019 (first published 2006)
368 pages
Sara Stridsberg is a Swedish author and translator. Her first fiction novel, Happy Sally, was about Sally Bauer, the first Scandinavian to swim the English Channel. In 2007, she was awarded the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize for her novel Drömfakulteten (The Dream Faculty), which is her second novel and a fictitious story about Valerie Solanas, who wrote SCUM Manifesto, which Stridsberg has translated into Swedish.
What is this book about?
Winner of the Nordic Prize in Literature, acclaimed Swedish novelist Sara Stridsberg makes her American debut with the Faculty of Dreams, conjuring the life and mind of 1960s firebrand, American feminist, and author of SCUM Manifesto Valerie Solanas.
In April 1988, Valerie Solanas — the writer, radical feminist, and would-be assassin of Andy Warhol — was discovered dead at fifty-two in her hotel room, in a grimy corner of San Francisco, alone, penniless, and surrounded by the typed pages of her last writings.
In The Faculty of Dreams, Sara Stridsberg revisits the hotel room where Solanas died; the courtroom where she was tried and convicted of attempting to murder Andy Warhol; the Georgia wastelands where she spent her childhood, where she was repeatedly raped by her father and beaten by her alcoholic grandfather; and the mental hospitals where she was shut away. Through imagined conversations and monologues, reminiscences and rantings, Stridsberg reconstructs this most intriguing and enigmatic of women, articulating the thoughts and fears that she struggled to express in life and giving a powerful, heartbreaking voice to the writer of the infamous SCUM Manifesto.
