Description
New softcover, 300 pages: pre-order your SIGNED copy available 5 May, 2024 which can be: picked up at our shop or at May 3 launch at the Andes Hotel; or mailed to you or a loved-one anywhere in the world. Please specify desired delivery method at checkout. In-store pick-up also available!
Nightshining is the second half of a diptych, the first half being The Eighth Moon, published 2024.
Nightshining is 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.
“In this prismatic book, Jennifer Kabat threads together floods, the Catskills, her father, rainmakers, the Cold War, climate change, the Mohawk Nation, small towns, and Kurt Vonnegut, among other subjects, into a complex emotional pattern that makes the past live—because it has never gone away.”
Lucy Sante, author of I Heard Her Call My Name
Jennifer Kabat will be in conversation with Iris Cushing at the launch at the Andes Hotel on May 3, 2025 from 5-7 pm. Irish Cushing is also a character in Nightshining.