Bryn Mawr Authors

Women, Performance and the Material of Memory

Women, Performance and the Material of Memory
$79.99

by Laura Engel BMC '90

This book proposes that the performance of archival research is related to the experience of tourism, where an individual immerses herself in a foreign environment, relating to and analyzing visual and sensory materials through embodiment and enactment. Each chapter highlights a particular set of tangible objects including: pocket diaries, portraits, drawings, magic lanterns, silhouettes, waxworks, and photographs in relation to actresses, authors, and artists such as: Elizabeth Inchbald, Sally Siddons, Marguerite Gardiner the Countess of Blessington, Isabella Beetham, Jane Read, Madame Tussaud, and Amelia M. Watson. Ultimately, operating as an archival tourist in my analyses, I offer strategies for thinking about the presence of women artists in the archives through methodologies that seek to connect materials from the past with our representations of them in the present.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781137589316
Publication Date: 
January 21, 2019
Author: 
Publisher: 

Girl Who Was No Kin to the Marshalls and Other Stories

Girl Who Was No Kin to the Marshalls and Other Stories
$28.00

by Anne Freeman BMC '56

With ten seemingly light, though occasionally shocking short stories, Anne Hobson Freeman carries the reader back to the joys and the fears, the yearnings and cockeyed values of assorted Virginians in the mid-twentieth-century South.
ISBN/SKU: 
9781736898956
Publication Date: 
September 21, 2021

Knowing is a Branching Trail

Knowing is a Branching Trail
$16.99

by Alison Hicks BMC '82

Knowing Is a Branching Trail is a poetic investigation of the many ways in which we know and come to understanding. In this collection of poetry, selected winner of the 2021 Birdy Poetry Prize, by Meadowlark Press, the poems engage with the work of thinkers and artists, from Charles Darwin and Samuel Beckett to Margaret Atwood and the anonymous paints of the Lascaux caves.

Themes range from pandemic and illness, childhood and parenting, observing and engaging with the natural world, and creating art. Poems in the book have previously appeared in Poet Lore, Blood Orange Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, and Vox Poetica, and other journals.

In this book, we witness an artist's pause, an extraction of poetry from the ordinary beat of life.

 

ISBN/SKU: 
9781736223260
Publication Date: 
September 14, 2021
Author: 
Publisher: 

Profound and Perfect Things

Profound and Perfect Things
$16.95
by Maribel Garcia BMC '95
Some truths can do more harm than good. This is what Isa comes to believe at the tender age of nine when she first has a dream about kissing a girl--an act that would never be acceptable to her family. By her late twenties, Isa has left her hometown in South Texas, so her conservative family won't discover that she's gay, and immersed herself in the workaholic routine of law school. One fateful night, she experiments with a man, and subsequently ended up with an unwanted pregnancy. Meanwhile, Isa's only sister, Cristina, loses the infant she spent years trying to conceive. Moving forward with her own pregnancy and giving the baby to Cristina seems like the perfect solution--until Isa bonds with the newborn. Still, the sisters move forward with the family adoption. Now everyone in the family has a secret.

Twelve years later, after much deceit and loss has passed between the sisters, Isa decides to reveal both her sexuality and her niece's true parentage to their family, against Cristina's wishes--but before all can be exposed, tragedy strikes.

Timely and gripping, Profound and Perfect Things is a story of two first-generation Mexican-American sisters striving to build a meaningful existence outside their traditional parent's approval and ways of life--and an exploration of the boundaries of our responsibilities to those we love.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781631525414
Publication Date: 
May 14, 2019
Author: 
Publisher: 

Queer Budapest, 1873-1961

Queer Budapest, 1873-1961
$32.50

by Anita Kurimay

By the dawn of the twentieth century, Budapest was a burgeoning cosmopolitan metropolis. Known at the time as the "Pearl of the Danube," it boasted some of Europe's most innovative architectural and cultural achievements, and its growing middle class was committed to advancing the city's liberal politics and making it an intellectual and commercial crossroads between East and West. In addition, as historian Anita Kurimay reveals, fin-de-siècle Budapest was also famous for its boisterous public sexual culture, including a robust gay subculture. Queer Budapest is the riveting story of nonnormative sexualities in Hungary as they were understood, experienced, and policed between the birth of the capital as a unified metropolis in 1873 and the decriminalization of male homosexual acts in 1961.

Kurimay explores how and why a series of illiberal Hungarian regimes came to regulate but also tolerate and protect queer life. She also explains how the precarious coexistence between the illiberal state and queer community ended abruptly at the close of World War II. A stunning reappraisal of sexuality's political implications, Queer Budapest recuperates queer communities as an integral part of Hungary's-and Europe's-modern incarnation.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780226705798
Publication Date: 
September 4, 2020

You Who Took the Boat Out

You Who Took the Boat Out
$14.99

by Alison Hicks BMC '82

A woman in middle-age takes a canoe out onto the water at night and must discern obstacles barely visible to keep her craft afloat. Her reward is a vision of stars transformed as they are reflected back through water. Her guide is the loon, whose red eye is capable of seeing underwater, and whose wail echoes and beckons. An adolescent whose mother has become ill must traverse the big country she finds inside herself to find a life worth living. A daughter mourns a father. In this collection, Alison Hicks looks beneath the surface of our emotional lives to murky shapes: the twists and turns we are unable to predict, the scrape of love and the experience of being lost, the whimsy of our fantasies, visitation by spirit guides of myth and legend, things we try to keep secret and yet seek to reveal, the hurt that has happened and the tasks to be undertaken.
ISBN/SKU: 
9780998087214
Publication Date: 
February 25, 2017
Author: 
Publisher: 

Postcolonial Satire: Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire

Postcolonial Satire: Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire
$100.00

by Amy Friedman BMC '86

Postcolonial Satire: Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire positions postcolonial South Asian satiric fiction at the intersection of the cutting-edge territory of political resistance writing and the ancient tradition of Menippean satire. Postcolonial Satire disrupts the relationship between postcolonial literature and magic realism, by discussing the work of writers such as G. V. Desani, Aubrey Menen, Salman Rushdie, and Irwin Allan Sealy as one movement into the entirely subversive realm of satire. Indian fiction, as well as the fiction of other colonized cultures, can be re-construed through the lens of satire as openly critical of a broad spectrum of political and cultural issues. Employing the strengths of postcolonial theory and criticism, Postcolonial Satire expands upon the postcolonial works of these authors by analyzing them as satire, rather than magical realism with satirical elements.
ISBN/SKU: 
9781498571968
Publication Date: 
October 16, 2019
Author: 
Publisher: 

Screendance Practitioner's Workbook

Screendance Practitioner's Workbook
$55.00

by Britt Whitmoyer Fishel


The Screendance Practitioner’s Workbook: A Pre-Production Guide for Creativity and Organization takes artists through a step-by-step process of considerations before filming a screendance. From picking a project theme and location scouting, to creating production timelines and storyboards, it channels both creativity and organization for each project. Part journal, part guide, this book acts as a resource for artists to unleash their imagination and explore their personal aesthetics in dance filmmaking.

ISBN/SKU: 
9798765713129
Publication Date: 
January 1, 1753
Author: 

Two Sisters of Fayetteville

Two Sisters of Fayetteville
$11.38

by Anolic, Tamar

Two Sisters of Fayetteville won Honorable Mention for Young Adult Fiction in the Firebird Book Awards for Fourth Quarter, 2022.

 

Seventeen-year-old Joanna Upshaw and her sister, sixteen-year-old Hannah, are two of twelve siblings in an insular, conservative, and evangelical Christian family- same as the Duggars, whose reality show they watch on TV. Joanna in particular is exhausted by the demands of helping her mother with the housework and childcare attendant in such a large family. She is also beginning to realize that she doesn't measure up to her parents' vision of a perfect Christian woman- or to any of their strict rules.

 

Hannah is the sister that Joanna is closest to, the one that shares her fatigue and anxiety. Both of them have spent their whole lives learning that their highest calling is to marry and have as many children as possible. However, as Joanna watches Hannah and two of their brothers court with the intention of marrying, she questions whether she is capable of doing the same, especially as her parents shoo her marriage prospects away one at a time. Afraid of becoming the old maid that never amounts to anything, Joanna finally makes plans to get away from her parents forever.

 

Fans of Jennifer Mathieu's Devoted and Julia Watts' Quiver will like this book.

ISBN/SKU: 
9798849876559
Publication Date: 
September 30, 2022
Author: 

House of Secrets

House of Secrets
$18.00

by Allison Levy BMC MA  '97 PhD ’00

A look into the tantalizing secrets of Florence's Palazzo Rucellai.

House of Secrets tells the remarkable story of Palazzo Rucellai from behind its celebrated façade. The house, beginning with its piecemeal assemblage by one of the richest men in Florence in the fifteenth century, has witnessed endless drama, from the butchering of its interior to a courtyard suicide to champagne-fueled orgies on the eve of World War I to a recent murder on its third floor. When the author, an art historian, serendipitously discovers a room for let in the house, she lands in the vortex of history and is tested at every turn--inside the house and out. Her residency in Palazzo Rucellai is informed as much by the sense of desire giving way to disappointment as by a sense of denial that soon enough must succumb to truth. House of Secrets is about the sharing of space, the tracing of footsteps, the overlapping of lives. It is about the willingness to lose oneself behind the façade, to live between past and present, to slip between the cracks of history and the crevices of our own imagination.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781788317559
Publication Date: 
May 5, 2020
Author: 
Publisher: