Nightshining: A Memoir in Four Floods
Jennifer Kabat in conversation with Elvia Wilk
Brooklyn Book Launch
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.
“Jennifer Kabat’s 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 vast—meticulous 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 live—because 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 one’s 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 us—despite all evidence—that all is not lost and that there’s reason for hope. I want to believe.”—Paul Chaat Smith, author of Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong
"Kabat examines grief, government secrets, and meteorological manipulation in this elegant and layered account."—Publishers Weekly
“Nightshining is a provocative memoir that considers how a community’s waterways reflect its history and portend future impacts of climate change.”—Foreword Reviews
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.
Elvia Wilk is a writer and editor living in New York. She is the author of the novel Oval (2019) and the essay collection Death by Landscape (2022). A new novel, A Diagnosis, is coming in 2026. Her work has appeared in publications like Frieze, Artforum, Bookforum, Granta, The Atlantic, n+1, The White Review, BOMB, Mousse, Flash Art, and Art Agenda. She is currently a contributing editor at e-flux Journal. She is the recipient of a 2019 Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant and a 2020 fellowship at the Berggruen Institute.