Reviewed by María Helga Guðmundsdóttir

Valerie Solanas is a cult icon of radical feminism, best known for calling for the elimination of men in a furious polemic entitled the SCUM Manifesto (SCUM being the “Society for Cutting Up Men”) and for her attempted murder of Andy Warhol in 1968. Following the shooting of Warhol, she was tried in court, diagnosed with schizophrenia, and institutionalized multiple times; she died in poverty and isolation in 1988 at the age of fifty-two. The Faculty of Dreams, originally published in Swedish in 2006, is a self-declared literary fantasy of her life, and Sara Stridsberg opens it with a warning. “Few facts are known about Valerie Solanas,” she cautions the reader, “and even to those this novel is not faithful.”