"Kabat examines grief, government secrets, and meteorological manipulation in this elegant and layered account."Publishers Weekly
Jennifer Kabats scintillating new memoir, Nightshining, is a feast of words . . . As much as this memoir explores the way water floods, it illustrates the power of memory to flood our consciousness.Rachel Lutwick-Deaner, The Southern Review of Books
Nightshining is a provocative memoir that considers how a communitys waterways reflect its history and portend future impacts of climate change.Foreword Reviews
Kabats lyrical and insightful prose moves associatively between past, present, and future, tracing the history of Kabats family alongside the history of the land.Devyn Andrews, West Trade Review
Jennifer Kabats Nightshining sifts a riveting exposé 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, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel
Nightshining is a book of belonging, belief, care, and legacy. Jennifer Kabat writes powerfully against narratives of progress, without abandoning wonder, passion, or possibility. By unpacking her own history, she asks what inheritance means on both big and small scales, prompting us to question long-held belief systems. In this catastrophic time, what must we continue to hold dear, of ourselves and the planet? What must we learn to do without, rupture, destroy? This book is intimate yet vastmeticulous and monumental.Elvia Wilk, author of Death by Landscape
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 livebecause it has never gone away.Lucy Sante, author of I Heard Her Call My Name
Nightshining rockets from deepest time to last Thursday, from Doomsday weapons to the endless mystery of ones parents, socialist dreams and capitalist nightmares, the Cold War then to daily life now in our seriously unhinged country. Like Kurt Vonnegut, whom she invokes and whose brother looms large in Nightshining, the book bounds through impossible dilemmas, fueled by shimmering upper atmosphere ice crystals. Kabat has next-level powers of discernment and shimmering prose. She writes with a calm fury, precise and generous and exacting. Her neatest trick is convincing usdespite all evidencethat all is not lost and that theres reason for hope. I want to believe.Paul Chaat Smith, author of Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong
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
Kabats 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
