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.

Body Is Not An Apolgy

Body Is Not An Apolgy
$18.95
Your body was never the problem.

This landmark book by activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor makes the case that body shame isn't a personal flaw--it's a social and political tool used to control us. Radical self-love is the antidote, and this fully updated second edition gives you both the understanding and the practice to build it.

What's inside:

  • A clear distinction between radical self-love, body positivity, and self-esteem--and why the difference matters
  • The roots of body shame: how media, capitalism, and systems of oppression manufacture self-hatred across race, size, gender, disability, and more
  • A four-pillar practice framework for moving from shame into sustained self-love
  • "Unapologetic agreements"--tools for extending radical self-love into relationships and communities
  • New in the second edition: expanded "freedom frameworks" for fighting systemic body terrorism at organizational and societal levels

  • Who this is for: Anyone who has ever felt their body was "too much" or "not enough"--and especially readers who feel unseen in mainstream wellness conversations, including fat, disabled, Black, and queer communities.

    What changes: Readers consistently describe this book as the moment shame stopped feeling like their fault. It's the rare self-love book that is also a social justice framework.

    If you're ready to stop apologizing for the body you're in, this is your next read.

    ISBN/SKU: 
    9781523090990
    Publication Date: 
    February 9, 2021

    Bookshop Essentials

    Bookshop Essentials
    $1.00

    Please add this item to your cart in a quantity equal to the dollar amount of your purchase of bookshop items that aren't posted on the website.  For example, Double Stuff Oreos cost $4.99 so you should add 5.  For the standard shipping charge of $6.00, add 6 essentials to your cart.  If you are unsure of your total, you can overestimate (remember that there is 6% sales tax on most non-food items) or email us at Bookshop@brynmawr.edu and we will gladly tally your order for you.  When we process your order you will only be charged the exact amount of the items you chose.

    ISBN/SKU: 
    ESSENTIALS

    Borderlands

    Borderlands
    $21.95

    Named one of the "Best Books of 1987" by Library Journal

    Selected by Utne Reader as part of its "Alternative Canon" in 1998

    One of Hungry Mind Review's "Best 100 Books of the 20th Century"

    Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúuacute;a's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity. Borderlands/La Frontera remaps our understanding of what a "border" is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us. This edition, coming March 1, 2022, will be a more condensed edition, containing only the original text from 1987, and will be at a more accessible price point for readers. For those looking for a scholarly context to this crucial work, the Critical Edition is currently available.

    The emotional and intellectual impact of the book is disorienting and powerful...all languages are spoken, and survival depends on understanding all modes of thought. In the borderlands new creatures come into being. Anzaldúa celebrates this "new mestiza" in bold, experimental writing. - The Village Voice

    Anzaldúa's pulsating weaving of innovative poetry with sparse informative prose brings us deep into the insider/outsider consciousness of the borderlands; that ancient and contemporary, crashing and blending world that divides and unites America. -- Women's Review of Books

    ISBN/SKU: 
    9781951874025
    Author: 
    Publisher: 

    Botanist's Assistant

    Botanist's Assistant
    $19.00
    A murder in the science lab shatters a woman's quiet and ordered life when she decides she must solve the crime herself in this entertaining and uplifting mystery.

    Plenty of people consider Margaret Finch odd. Six-feet-tall and big-boned, she lives alone in a small cabin in the woods, drives a 20-year-old truck, and schedules her life so precisely you can tell the time and day of the week by the chore she is doing and what she is wearing. But the same attributes that cause her to be labeled eccentric--an obsessive attention to detail and the ability to organize almost anything--make her invaluable in her job as Research Assistant II to a talented and charismatic botanist.

    It's those very same qualities, however, that also turn Margaret into a target after a surprising death shakes the small university where she works. Even as authorities claim the death appears to be from natural causes, Margaret fears it might be something more: a murder born of jealousy and dark secrets. With the aid of a newly hired and enigmatic night custodian, Margaret finds herself thrust into the role of detective, forcing her to consider that she may not be able to find the killer before the killer finds her.

    With a cast of quirky and likeable characters that one won't soon forget, The Botanist's Assistant is a delightful story of perseverance and the power in all of us to survive.

    ISBN/SKU: 
    9780593638118
    Publication Date: 
    November 18, 2025
    Author: 
    Publisher: 

    BRAIDING SWEETGRASS (P)

    BRAIDING SWEETGRASS (P)
    $20.00

    A New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Readers Pick

    #1 New York Times Bestseller

    A Washington Post and Los Angeles Times Bestseller

    As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert).

    Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings--asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass--offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

    ISBN/SKU: 
    9781571313560
    Publisher: 

    Brass Knuckles

    Brass Knuckles
    $8.48
    $16.95
    Sale 50% off 1 item
    The poems in this powerful first book have grown from the American urban experience of the last half of this century, a time of decay and diminishing possibilities; they vary from realistic vignettes of working-class Chicago neighborhoods to prose poems elegant and spare in their surrealism. At the middle of this book and at the thematic center of the collection is Dybek's remarkable reworking of the myth of Persephone, in which the American goddess learns to prefer the underworld and has fallen in love with Death.
    ISBN/SKU: 
    9780887484155
    Publication Date: 
    January 1, 2004

    Bread and Circus

    Bread and Circus
    $18.00
    Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize "Discerning and significant." --Poetry Foundation "A sharp memoir in verse." --LitHub This powerful and timely collection of autobiographical poems from Yale Young Poets Award Winner and Philadelphia's former Poet Laureate Airea D. Matthews about the economics of class is a brilliant intellectual and artistic contribution to the ongoing conversation about American inequality.As a former student of economics, Airea D. Matthews was fascinated and disturbed by 18th-century Scottish economist Adam Smith's magnum opus The Wealth of Nations. Now, she presents a direct challenge to Smith's theory of the invisible hand, which claims self-interest is the key to optimal economic outcomes. By juxtaposing redacted texts by Smith and the French Marxist Guy Debord with autobiographical prose and poems, Bread and Circus personally offers how self-interest fails when it reduces people to commodity and spectacle. A layered collection to be read and reread, with poems that range from tragic to humorous, in forms as varied and nuanced as the ideas the book considers, Bread and Circus asks what it is to have survived, indeed to have flourished, and at what cost. "Full of humane wisdom, this powerful volume forces readers to acknowledge systemic inequity" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) and is ideal for fans of Elizabeth Alexander, Natalie Diaz, Eve Ewing, and Gregory Pardlo.
    ISBN/SKU: 
    9781668011461
    Publication Date: 
    May 21, 2024
    Author: 
    Publisher: 

    Broken Earth #1: Fifth Season

    Broken Earth #1: Fifth Season
    $19.99
    At the end of the world, a woman must hide her secret power and find her kidnapped daughter in this "intricate and extraordinary" Hugo Award winning novel of power, oppression, and revolution. (The New York Times)

    This is the way the world ends. . .for the last time.

    It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester.

    This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy.

    Read the first book in the critically acclaimed, three-time Hugo award-winning trilogy by NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin.

    ISBN/SKU: 
    9780316229296
    Publication Date: 
    August 4, 2015
    Author: 
    Publisher: 

    Brooklyn

    Brooklyn
    $16.99
    $12.00
    $12.00 - $16.99
    Colm Tóibín's New York Times bestselling novel--now an acclaimed film starring Saoirse Ronan and Jim Broadbent nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Picture--is "a moving, deeply satisfying read" (Entertainment Weekly) about a young Irish immigrant in Brooklyn in the early 1950s.

    "One of the most unforgettable characters in contemporary literature" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the hard years following World War Two. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America, she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.

    Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, who loves the Dodgers and his big Italian family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.

    Author "Colm Tóibín...is his generation's most gifted writer of love's complicated, contradictory power" (Los Angeles Times). "Written with mesmerizing power and skill" (The Boston Globe), Brooklyn is a "triumph...One of those magically quiet novels that sneak up on readers and capture their imaginations" (USA TODAY).

    ISBN/SKU: 
    9781439148952
    Publication Date: 
    March 2, 2009
    Author: 
    Publisher: 

    Brown Girl Dreaming

    Brown Girl Dreaming
    $12.99
    NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER - NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The acclaimed author of Red at the Bone tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing poems.

    A NEWBERY HONOR BOOK - WINNER OF THE CORETTA SCOTT KING BOOK AWARD - A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST MIDDLE GRADE BOOK OF THE CENTURY


    "Moving and resonant . . . captivating."--The Wall Street Journal

    I am born in Ohio but

    the stories of South Carolina already run
    like rivers
    through my veins.

    Raised in South Carolina and New York, Jacqueline Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 70s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, providing a glimpse into a child's soul as she finds her voice through writing and searches for her place in the world.

    Teeming with feeling and deeply personal, Brown Girl Dreaming is the groundbreaking chronicle of Woodson's journey to storytelling, and a beautiful portrayal of physical, emotional, and spiritual growth.

    ISBN/SKU: 
    9780147515827
    Publication Date: 
    October 11, 2016