Valerie; or, The Faculty of Dreams

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 the 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.