<DIV><p> This volume brings together prose from three decades of writing by Verena Stefan, one of the most influential contemporary feminist writers in the world.</p><p> The original 1975 German publication of <I>Shedding</I>-a novella that narrates the radical transformation of a young woman against the backdrop of the early 1970s women's, civil rights, and health care movements-created such a stir that the work has been hailed as "the feminist equivalent to Mao's little red book." To date, over 300,000 copies of <I>Shedding</I> have been sold in Germany. Included here is the first English translation of <I>Literally Dreaming</I>, a delightful collection of eight stories written in the 1980s, drawing a portrait of life as the narrator of <I>Shedding</I> may have envisioned it-women living together in natural and rural settings, independent of men. Stefan has written for this volume a new essay, "Euphoria and Cacophony," which traces the extraordinary reception-and backlash-that greeted <I>Shedding </I>in the 1970s, and the effect on her both as a writer and as a symbol of the German women's movement.</p><p> 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.</p><p> </p></DIV>