Escuela de sueños. (School of Dreams)

Was Valerie Solanas, the controversial writer who shot Andy Warhol in 1968, a brilliant feminist or a schizophrenic man hater? Stridsberg's fictionalized biography of Solanas melds fantasy and fact in a searing, poetic study of a bright yet troubled visionary whose character has inspired plays, pop music, and films. Using the night of Solanas's solitary death in a squalid San Francisco hotel as a powerful framing device, Stridsberg weaves excerpts from Solanas's scathing SCUM Manifesto with second-person narrative and imaginary conversations between Solanas; her mother, Dorothy; Warhol; and various actual and invented people, including the author herself. What emerges is an intelligent meditation on the turbulent 1960s and the emerging women's movement. Stridsberg, who won the Nordic Council's Literature Prize for the novel, at times takes her poetic license to the extreme, placing a fictionalized desert town in the state of Georgia. Nevertheless, the excellent translation captures Stridsberg's evocative prose, which renders immaterial the riddle of whether Solanas was a visionary or a lunatic. Highly recommended for popular libraries and bookstores.—Pamela Corante, Los Angeles