Nightshining

Jennifer Kabat

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Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

Milkweed Editions
13 August 2025

History of the Americas; Management of land & natural resources; Natural disasters; Local history

""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 three-foot waves in her basement.

This is far from the first-and hardly the worst-natural disaster to devastate her town. As Kabat dives deeper into the region's fraught environmental history, she discovers it was more than once the site of Cold War weather experimentation. She traces connections across history, following a technology that spirals up from a 1950 flood in her town to the Vietnam War, the Reagan presidency, and a present day ""fix"" for climate change. She encounters unlikely characters along the way, including two scientists at General Electric: Vincent Schaefer, who never finished high school, and Kurt Vonnegut's older brother Bernard. And all the while she searches for ways to cope with the grief of her environmentalist father's recent passing. ""Because I need the water to speak to me too,"" she writes.

Inquisitive and experimental, Nightshining uses place as a palimpsest of history, digging into questions of personal responsibility and planetary change. With ""characteristically lyrical incision"" (Marko Gluhaich), Kabat circles back to 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.

By: Jennifer Kabat
Imprint: Milkweed Editions
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 215mm, Width: 139mm,
ISBN: 9781639550708
ISBN 10: 1639550704
Pages: 200
Publication Date: 13 August 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

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.

Reviews for Nightshining

"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"