General Books
Your BMC Bookshop carries a wide variety of books beyond the curriculum, a curated selection handpicked by store staff. If you don't see what you're looking for here on on our shelves, we are happy to special order practically anything for you. Over 100,000 titles are available for fast shipment directly to your address from our partner warehouses. Enter a title, author or ISBN in the search box at the top of this page to see what's in stock. If the search doesn't work for you, please email us at bookshop@brynmawr.edu and we will be happy to research your request. It's no trouble -- we love helping folks find books they're looking for.
Kairos
by Jenny Erpenbeck
Wednesday, September 27
WINNER OF THE 2024 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE
Jenny Erpenbeck (the author of Go, Went, Gone and Visitation) is an epic storyteller and arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature. Erpenbeck's new novel Kairos--an unforgettably compelling masterpiece--tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after. In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears. As the Times Literary Supplement writes: "The weight of history, the particular experiences of East and West, and the ways in which cultural and subjective memory shape individual identity has always been present in Erpenbeck's work. She knows that no one is all bad, no state all rotten, and she masterfully captures the existential bewilderment of this period between states and ideologies."
In the opinion of her superbly gifted translator Michael Hofmann, Kairos is the great post-Unification novel. And, as The New Republic has commented on his work as a translator: "Hofmann's translation is invaluable--it achieves what translations are supposedly unable to do: it is at once 'loyal' and 'beautiful.'"
Go Went Gone
by Jenny Erpenbeck
Wednesday, September 27
Days of Afrekete
by Asali Solomon
Discussion Date: October 27
"I didn't feel like I was reading this novel--I felt like I was living it." --Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House
From award-winning author Asali Solomon, The Days of Afrekete is a tender, surprising novel of two women at midlife who rediscover themselves--and perhaps each other, inspired by Mrs. Dalloway, Sula, and Audre Lorde's Zami Liselle Belmont is having a dinner party. It seems a strange occasion--her husband, Winn, has lost his bid for the state legislature--but what better way to thank key supporters than a feast? Liselle was never sure about her husband becoming a politician, never sure about the limelight, never sure about the life of fundraising and stump speeches. Then an FBI agent calls to warn her that Winn might be facing corruption charges. An avalanche of questions tumbles around her: Is it possible he's guilty? Who are they to each other; who have they become? How much of herself has she lost--and was it worth it? And just this minute, how will she make it through this dinner party? Across town, Selena Octave is making her way through the same day, the same way she always does--one foot in front of the other, keeping quiet and focused, trying not to see the terrors all around her. Homelessness, starving children, the very living horrors of history that made America possible: these and other thoughts have made it difficult for her to live an easy life. The only time she was ever really happy was with Liselle, back in college. But they've lost touch, so much so that when they ran into each other at a drugstore just after Obama was elected president, they barely spoke. But as the day wears on, memories of Liselle begin to shift Selena's path. Inspired by Mrs. Dalloway and Sula, as well as Audre Lorde's Zami, Asali Solomon's The Days of Afrekete is a deft, expertly layered, naturally funny, and deeply human examination of two women coming back to themselves at midlife. It is a watchful celebration of our choices and where they take us, the people who change us, and how we can reimagine ourselves even when our lives seem set.End of Days
by Jenny Erpenbeck
Wednesday, September 27
Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Hans Fallada Prize, The End of Days, by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five "books," each leading to a different death of the same unnamed female protagonist. How could it all have gone differently?--the narrator asks in the intermezzos. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna after World War I, but a pact she makes with a young man leads to a second death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, yet our heroine ends up in a labor camp. But her fate does not end there....
A novel of incredible breadth and amazing concision, The End of Days offers a unique overview of the twentieth century.
Ghost Forest
by Kimiko Hahn
ON CAMPUS - February 5
Opening with forty-three new formally inventive poems and leading the reader back in time through selections from her ten previous volumes, The Ghost Forest offers a contemplative and haunting narrative of a writer's artistic journey through craft and form while illuminating her personal history. Exploring the mysteries of science, nature, and the experiences of contemporary womanhood, Hahn both reinvents classic Japanese forms and experiments with traditional Western ones. Braided into the poems and narrative thread, a series of photos transforms the new-and-selected into a hybrid autobiography. This arresting collection derives new beauty from long-gone remnants.
A Riotous Disorder
She mistakes one word for another--
Something her brain naturally concocts.
Her unruly gray matter and her heart
Mistake one word for an other--
Razor for river, cistern for sister.
Even cock for clock.
She mistakes one word for a mother--
A safe her brain naturally unlocks.--
Butterfly Lampshade
by Aimee Bender
Wednesday, November 8
Twenty years later, Francie is compelled to make sense of that moment, and two other incidents -- her discovery of a desiccated beetle from a school paper, and a bouquet of dried roses from some curtains. Her recall is exact -- she is sure these things happened. But despite her certainty, she wrestles with the hold these memories maintain over her, and what they say about her own place in the world.
As Francie conjures her past and reduces her engagement with the world to a bare minimum, she begins to question her relationship to reality. The scenes set in Francie's past glow with the intensity of childhood perception, how physical objects can take on an otherworldly power. The question for Francie is, What do these events signify? And does this power survive childhood?
Told in the lush, lilting prose that led the San Francisco Chronicle to say Aimee Bender is "a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language," The Butterfly Lampshade is a heartfelt and heartbreaking examination of the sometimes overwhelming power of the material world, and a broken love between mother and child.
Color Master
by Aimee Bender
Wednesday, November 8
A New York Times Notable Book of 2013
A traumatic event unfolds when a girl with hair the color of golden wheat appears in an apple orchard; a woman plays out a fantasy with her husband and finds she cannot go back to her old sex life; an ugly woman marries an ogre and struggles to decide if she should stay with him after he mistakenly eats their children; and two sisters travel deep into Malaysia, where one learns the art of mending tigers who have been ripped to shreds.
Inheritance
by Taylor Johnson
ON CAMPUS - February 26
Inheritance is a black sensorium, a chapel of color and sound that speaks to spaciousness, surveillance, identity, desire, and transcendence. Influenced by everyday moments of Washington, DC living, the poems live outside of the outside and beyond the language of categorical difference, inviting anyone listening to listen a bit closer. Inheritance is about the self's struggle with definition and assumption.
Milk Blood Heat
by Dantiel W. Moniz
ON CAMPUS - February 26
SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN AND PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM AWARDS
A NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION 5 UNDER 35
"Electric."--TIME
"Enchanting."--Elle
"Thrilling."--Glamour
"Downright magical."--Boston Globe
"Not only be read but felt. Like Danielle Evans and Lauren Groff, Moniz is unafraid to expose the darkened corners of the Sunshine State, and of female desire."--O, The Oprah Magazine
A National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree and one of one of the most anticipated books of the year for Elle; Entertainment Weekly; BuzzFeed; O, The Oprah Magazine; Essence; and The Millions, among many others, Dantiel W. Moniz's Milk Blood Heat follows a cast of young girls, women, and men in Northern Florida who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning and the joys and pains of everyday life. This is an incendiary debut collection by an important new voice in literature.
"Stunning."--Tampa Bay Times
"In Moniz's collection, the ordinary experience of being female is laced with a kind of enchantment... Entire stories seem bathed in a warm radiance."--New York Times
"Outstanding."--Atlanta Journal Constitution
"Prose that is both nuanced and so lush you can taste it."--Shondaland
Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
by Aimee Bender
Wednesday, November 8
On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in the slice. To her horror, she finds that her cheerful mother tastes of despair. Soon, she's privy to the secret knowledge that most families keep hidden: her father's detachment, her mother's transgression, her brother's increasing retreat from the world. But there are some family secrets that even her cursed taste buds can't discern.