Overview

""Jennifer Kabat's Nightshining sifts a riveting expose of the Cold War technocratic fantasy-state through lyrical family memoir. Her superb investigation calls to mind those of Rebecca Solnit and Errol Morris, among others.""-Jonathan Lethem A propulsive, layered examination of the conflict between the course of nature and human legacies of resistance and control. Floods, geoengineering, climate crisis. Her first year in Margaretville, New York, Jennifer Kabat wakes to a rain-swollen stream and her basement flooding. As she delves into the region's fraught environmental history, it becomes clear that this is far from the first-and hardly the worst-disaster in the region. Tracing connections across time, she uncovers Cold War weather experiments, betrayals of the Mohawk Nation, and an unlikely cast of characters, including Kurt Vonnegut's older brother, Bernard-all reflected through grief brought on by her father's recent passing. Inquisitive and experimental, Nightshining uses place as a palimpsest of history. With lyrical incision, Kabat mirrors her own life experience and the essence of being human-the cosmos thrumming in our bodies, connecting readers to the land around us and time before us.

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9781639550708

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Reviews

"Praise for The Eighth Moon ""Kabat traces her journey through the archives; outlines her experience making a home in Margaretville as she befriends locals; and issues abundant literary reflections on such writers as Elizabeth Hardwick and Adrienne Rich. [. . .] an introspective investigation of the interplay between writing, history, and political action.""--Publishers Weekly ""In this first part of a diptych, Kabat writes with characteristically lyrical incision about her Catskills community in upstate New York, its historic, farmer-led 'Anti-Rent War' and her parents' own interests in collectivity.""--Marko Gluhaich, Frieze ""Kabat's debut memoir unearths the history of the small Catskills town to which she relocated in 2005. The site of a 19th-century rural populist uprising, and now home to a colorful cast of characters, the Appalachian community becomes a lens through which Kabat explores political, economic, and ecological issues, mining the archives and the work of such writers as Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick along the way.""--The Millions"

Author Information

Jennifer Kabat was a finalist for the Notting Hill Editions' essay prize and has been published in BOMB and The Best American Essays. The author of The Eighth Moon, her writing has also appeared in Frieze, Harper's, McSweeney's, and The Believer. She's received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism and teaches at the School of Visual Arts and the New School. An apprentice herbalist, she lives in rural Upstate New York and serves on her volunteer fire department.

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