Bryn Mawr Authors

Jiny LAN and the Art of Subversion

Jiny LAN and the Art of Subversion
$34.99

by Qinna Shen, Associate Professor and Chair of German and German Studies

 

Examines the career and message paintings of the feminist conceptual artist Jiny Lan, analyzing a cross-section of works that invite literary, historical, socio-political and transcultural interpretations.

Jiny Lan is an avant-garde Chinese artist based in Germany. A founding member of the feminist art collective "Bald Girls," she infuses astute, politically charged, and iconoclastic criticism into her conceptual and visual art. Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion provides a hermeneutic and critical analysis of Lan's idiosyncratic, provocative, and ingenious artwork. "Subversion" refers not only to her political and cultural subversiveness but also to her iterative technique of reproduction and repainting, which she uses to create a series of genealogically related "sub-versions" of her own paintings.

As an émigré and immigrant artist, Lan is profoundly influenced by both eastern and western cultures and traditions. Her immersive experience and extensive knowledge of two contrasting national histories, cultures, and political systems endows her with a unique intersectional positionality. Her artwork is at once figurative and abstract, realistic and fantastic, chaotic and logical, appropriative and creative. It interrogates serious issues such as censorship, authoritarianism, democracy, human rights, sexism, racism, war, migration, and Covid-19, but in a dynamic and often humorous manner. This book lays a foundation for evaluating Lan as an artist whose work invites discussions about portraiture, power, temporality, space, corporality, and sex.

This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781640142916
Publication Date: 
November 18, 2025
Author: 
Publisher: 

Joey's Buddy

Joey's Buddy
$12.99

Joey went into the foster care system at age 7. He was separated from his mother, sister, cousin, aunt, and his stuffed animal "Buddy." After three foster homes, he found a permanent foster home where he remained until he went to college. He was able to take care of a real dog whom he named "Buddy" and who moved with him into that home. Despite all the difficulties, he thrived!

ISBN/SKU: 
9780578874449
Publication Date: 
September 13, 2021
Author: 
Publisher: 

Kingdom of Without

Kingdom of Without
$12.99
"Wickedly clever, outrageously fun, and bursting with heart." --Rebecca Mix, New York Times bestselling author of The Ones We Burn

A wily young thief must use her wits to survive futuristic, alternate history Beijing in this Les Misérables-inspired young adult cyberpunk "fast-paced heist [that] balances lofty ideals of change with snappy dialogue and pulse-pounding action" (Publishers Weekly).

When Zhong Ning'er takes the job, she expects a smash-and-grab burglary she's doing to make rent and help out a friend. What she doesn't expect: a sad-eyed army boy who dreams of insurrection, a former rebel leader trapped inside a secret lab, a group of aspiring revolutionaries who are first collaborators, then compatriots, and then, perhaps, friends.

But this is Beijing, nearly a hundred and fifty years after General Yuan Shikai successfully declared himself emperor in 1915. His descendants rule the country from their seat in the imperial city, their gendarmerie--the Beiyang Army--run the streets, aided by cyborgs and the Brocade Guard. Walls have risen, dividing the city into districts called Rings--nominally only by geography, but in truth by class. Earthquakes devastate the northern farmlands, crops drown in the southern typhoons, and all over the country people are hooked on a drug they call Complacency.

As a Sixth Ring girl who watched previous uprisings crushed brutally by the court, Ning'er isn't much of an optimist, and she's certainly no revolutionary. But that might not be up to her--as the stakes get higher, the time for passivity is quickly running out, and she must decide if she wants to sit idly in her cynicism, or embrace the breathless, terrible possibility of hope.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781665901451
Publication Date: 
November 12, 2024

Last Whaler

Last Whaler
$20.95

by Cynthia Reeves '80

A gripping tale of survival and love in the unforgiving Arctic wilderness.

In the late 1930s, Tor, a seasoned beluga whaler, and his wife Astrid, a trained botanist, venture to a remote Arctic whaling station. Stranded by unforeseen ice conditions, they face a harrowing winter where the twenty-four-hour darkness is only one of their challenges. As they struggle against violent storms, brutal cold, and the threat of polar bears, Astrid discovers she is pregnant, adding another layer of complexity to their already strained marriage.

The Last Whaler is more than a survival story; it's a meditation on grief, guilt, and the human impact on pristine environments. Can Tor and Astrid find redemption amidst the desolation, or will the Arctic's harsh beauty claim them both? Perfect for readers seeking atmospheric historical fiction with a touch of suspense.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781646035083
Publication Date: 
September 3, 2024
Author: 
Publisher: 

Late Epistle

Late Epistle
$15.00

by Anne Myles BMC '84

Winner of 2022 Sappho's Prize in Poetry

Late Epistle is a rare first book, one that radiates all the pleasures of poetry-sound, form, and figurative language, among others-but also one that evidences a life transformed by discovery. Read and marvel at Anne Myles's prowess, then read again to be forever changed by her vulnerability and depth of feeling. This "dark and lustrous" book permits entry into the "not-yet-known" with miraculous clarity.
-Natasha Sajé, author of The Future Will Call You Something Else

A sensual imagination informs these poems with startling images and line turns that astonish. I love the childhood narratives, the family sadnesses and secrets revealed, the tender, wise observations. Formally inventive, the poems that showcase a woman-loving-woman anchor the speaker in a story of self-invention and a sustainable life.
-Robin Becker, author of The Black Bear Inside Me

Muriel Rukeyser asks, "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?" In this candid, emphatically visceral collection, Anne Myles speaks her truth with unflinching ardency, astonishing the reader with poems that are both masterfully crafted and strikingly forthright. Reading this book, I experienced the pure delight of a strongly female voice claiming its identity and purpose.
-Martha Silano, author of Gravity Assist

In Late Epistle, Anne Myles has given us a thoughtful and moving account of her journey to become a poet, singing in a voice (Athena-like, sprung fully formed) that is lyrical and tender, honest and unsparing. In poems of family, loss, love, grief, and the ongoing quest to find and express the true self, the deep intelligence of the work shines through in evocative imagery, lovely language, and subtle yet effective uses of form.
-Moira Egan, author of Amore e morte

ISBN/SKU: 
9798987763605
Publication Date: 
July 3, 2023
Author: 
Publisher: 

Letters and Photographs from the Battle Country

Letters and Photographs from the Battle Country
$17.48
$34.95
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In August 1918 a Massachusetts-born woman named Margaret Hall boarded a transport ship in New York City that would take her across the Atlantic to work with the American Red Cross in France, then in the devastating grips of the First World War. Working at a canteen at a railroad junction close to the Western Front, Hall aided both Allied and German soldiers. While there she was regularly forced to seek shelter from German bombardments. After the Armistice, Hall explored the destruction of the surrounding region; her diary entries, letters, and photos reveal a world of ruins and human remains.

After Hall returned to the United States, she wrote a memoir that she shared privately with friends and family. Published here for the first time, Hall's words offer a first-hand account of life on the Western Front in those last months of the war and its immediate aftermath. Balancing her deeply held convictions about the horror of this conflict with both wry humor and a sense of urgency, Hall's narrative gives the reader an unusually immediate and individualized testimony, one that rivals those of similar but better-known war memoirs, such as those by Vera Brittain and Edith Wharton.

The book features dozens of Hall's striking and never-before-published photographs, including of the movement of troops through town, women working just behind the front lines, and the landscape left when the war was "over." The pairing of Hall's remarkable images with her vivid reporting results in an invaluable, and uniquely personal, account of one of the most cataclysmic events in history.

Distributed for the Massachusetts Historical Society

ISBN/SKU: 
9781936520077
Publication Date: 
August 18, 2014

Letters to Our Sons

Letters to Our Sons
$10.00
$19.99
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On April 15, 2018, seven prisoners were slaughtered and twenty-two seriously injured during a prison riot in South Carolina. This incident, prison conditions and mass incarceration were the inspiration for this book, Letters to Our Sons, which represents five years of research. Authors Dawn Simmons and Heru Mossiah Maat collaborated with over 80 prisoners from behind the steel fences of maximum security prisons in South Carolina and throughout the United States. These prisoners have "stepped up" in an effort to bring awareness to the mass incarceration of our youth in the United States of America. From their personal and collective experience, they use powerful heart-wrenching candid narratives to highlight that prison is a place of mental destruction, violence, poor living conditions and poor quality food. These incarcerated men also acknowledge that more adult males and teenage boys enter the prison system than those who enter college as well as lament that young men enter the prison system by the truck loads as if there were no other options. In response, these prisoners who are convicted burglars, drug dealers, rapists and murderers from diverse backgrounds hope to make a positive difference by telling their story.

Dawn Simmons and Heru Mossiah Maat have written a must read, tell all book. Letters to Our Sons describes the circumstances that have led many men to prison, the prison living conditions, and the frustration and dehumanization, which breeds violence within prison walls. For further insights about the current prison system, criminal justice activists, former and current correctional staff, and police officers provided their narratives, opinions and advice especially about hope for the future. Through infographics, research and essays, the book will educate readers about the truths of prison life.

In Letters to Our Sons, over 80 prisoners found the strength and courage to reveal their true wisdom and vulnerability in order to change the direction of future criminal justice and prison legislation. Most importantly, they hope to intervene in our children's lives before it is too late.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780986390395
Publication Date: 
October 31, 2018
Publisher: 

Losing the Plot

Losing the Plot
$30.00
An examination of the relationship between literature and classical Hollywood cinema reveals a profound longing for plot in modernist fiction.

The modernist novel sought to escape what Virginia Woolf called the "tyranny" of plot. Yet even as twentieth-century writers pushed against the constraints of plot-driven Victorian novels, plot kept its hold on them through the influence of another medium: the cinema. Focusing on the novels of Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner--writers known for their affinities and connections to classical Hollywood--Pardis Dabashi links the moviegoing practices of these writers to the tensions between the formal properties of their novels and the characters in them. Even when they did not feature outright happy endings, classical Hollywood films often provided satisfying formal resolutions and promoted normative social and political values. Watching these films, modernist authors were reminded of what they were leaving behind--both formally and in the name of aesthetic experimentalism--by losing the plot.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780226829258
Publication Date: 
November 6, 2023

Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism

Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism
$16.48
$32.95
Sale 50% off 1 item

Unique empirically grounded analysis of how audiences negotiate sexism and feminism across media, from popular television shows to dating apps.

Feminism can reflect the cultural moment, especially as media appropriate and use feminist messaging and agenda to various ends. Yet media can also push boundaries, exposing audiences to ideas they may not be familiar with and advancing public acceptance of concepts once considered taboo. Moreover, audiences are far from passive recipients, especially in the digital age. In Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism, Andrea L. Press and Francesca Tripodi focus on how audiences across platforms not only consume but also create meanings-sometimes quite transgressive meanings-in engaging with media content. If television shows such as Game of Thrones and Jersey Shore and dating apps such as Tinder are sites of persistent everyday sexism, then so, too, are they sites of what Press and Tripodi call "media-ready feminism." In developing a sociologically based conception of reception that encompasses media's progressive potential, as well as the processes of domestication through which audiences and users revert to more limited cultural schemas, Press and Tripodi make a vital contribution to gender and media studies, and help to illuminate the complexity of our current moment.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781438481968
Publication Date: 
July 2, 2021

Miscellany of the South Seas

Miscellany of the South Seas
$35.00
by Kathlene Baldanza - BMC '01

A riveting tale of danger, adventure, and connection

In 1835 young Chinese scholar Cai Tinglan was caught in a typhoon while sailing across the Taiwan Strait. He and his shipmates spent a harrowing week at sea before drifting to the coast of central Vietnam. With an escort of Vietnamese soldiers, Cai traveled north along the famous "Mandarin Road," meeting governors-general of each province he passed through along his overland journey to Fujian Province in China. Cai documented his experiences in Miscellany of the South Seas (Hainan zazhu), a vivid account of clothing, food, religious practices, government affairs, and other aspects of daily life in early Nguyễn dynasty Vietnam.

Cai's encounters with diasporic Chinese show the Hokkien merchant community's penetration into Vietnamese society, while his warm embrace by Nguyễn officials illustrates a shared elite world of classical culture across international borders. In this first English translation, Kathlene Baldanza and Zhao Lu provide a comprehensive introduction that puts Cai's account in social, political, and economic context, along with extensive annotation and a glossary.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780295751672
Publication Date: 
July 7, 2023