Author Talk: Heather Clark at Bedford Books
Bedford Books is thrilled to welcome Pulitzer Prize finalist Heather Clark, author of The Scrapbook. Heather will be joined in conversation by award-winning novelist and essayist Kristopher Jansma.
Books will be available for sale and signing. Light refreshments and snacks will be served.
About the book:
From the award-winning author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, a stunning debut novel: the story of an intense first love haunted by history and family memory, inspired by the startling WWII scrapbook of Clark’s own grandfather, hidden in an attic until after his death.
The traumas of the past and the aftershocks of fascism echo and reverberate through the present in this story of a lifechanging seduction.
Harvard, 1996. Anna is about to graduate when she falls hard for Christoph, a visiting German student. Captivated by his beauty and intelligence, she follows him to Germany, where charming squares and grand facades belie the nation’s recent history and the war’s destruction. Christoph condemns his country’s actions but remains cryptic about the part his own grandfather played. Anna, meanwhile, cannot forget the photos taken by her American GI grandfather at the end of the war, preserved in a scrapbook only she has seen.
As Anna travels back and forth to Germany to deepen her relationship with the elusive Christoph, her perspective is powerfully interrupted by chapters that follow both of their grandfathers during the war. One witnesses the plight of Holocaust victims in the days after liberation and helps capture Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, while the other fights for Nazi Germany. Their fragmented stories haunt Anna and her lover two generations later—and may still tear them apart.
Not a “World War Two novel” in the traditional sense, The Scrapbook delivers a consuming tale of first love, laced with a backstory of dark family legacies and historical conscience.
About Heather Clark:
Heather Clark is a biographer, literary critic, and novelist. She the author, most recently, of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of 2021, as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a “Book of the Year” in The Guardian, The Times, The Boston Globe, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. Her recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, NYPL Cullman Center Fellowship, the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, NEH Public Scholars Fellowship, and a Leon Levy Biography Fellowship. Clark’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Harvard Review, Poetry, Time, Air Mail, Literary Hub, PN Review, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, The Scrapbook, is coming in June 2025 from Pantheon. She holds a doctorate in English literature from Oxford University, and lives outside New York City.
About Kristopher Jansma:
Kristopher grew up in Lincroft, New Jersey. He received his B.A. in The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Columbia University. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels, OUR NARROW HIDING PLACES (Ecco/2024) WHY WE CAME TO THE CITY (Viking/2016), and THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS, (Viking/2013). His book of essays on the creative process is REVISIONARIES: WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM THE LOST, UNFINISHED, AND JUST PLAIN BAD WORK OF GREAT WRITERS (Quirk, 2024)
His work has been translated into German, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Czech, and Korean.
He writes a column for Electric Literature about Unfinished Business, and the fates and afterlives of authors’ incomplete works. His writing has also been published in The New York Times, ZYZZYVA Magazine, The Sun, Prairie Schooner, Chicago Quarterly Review, Slice Magazine, Salon, Real Simple, The Millions, and elsewhere.
He is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at SUNY New Paltz College. He lives in New York with his wife and children.
