Nightshining

by Jennifer Kabat

“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 

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.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

360 pages, Paperback

Published May 6, 2025

About the author

Jennifer Kabat is an essayist and novelist. Her essays are sweeping histories that interleave socialism, modernism and science with her own longing for a way to understand socialism and democracy today. Included in Best American Essays, her writing has also appeared in McSweeney’s, BOMB, The New York Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, Granta and The White Review, among others. She frequently writes for Frieze and has contributed to artists’ monographs and museum catalogues including London’s Victoria & Albert museum.

Reviews

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kabat sums this up beautifully in her epilogue:

‘In writing, sentences create a sense of progress- beginning, middle, and end, building to understanding and suffused with linear time. But I do not understand, and I do not want order here. Kurt Vonnegut and his grotesque situational poetry, I think, exist in this kind of realm.

I’ve laid all these elements side by side because I cannot create order from them, not from the news, not the weather and disasters, not the climate, and not my family - love them as I do. To write against chronology is to hold these moments together and all at once so they are not over. They are unresolved and uncomfortable. There is no epiphany at the end.’

[Kyle D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard to put into words--I want to say "lovely," but it's also challenging and interconnected and filled with water and don't forget important--but again, even "important" is just a word we say, while the connections between us all are more than that, right? Right?

Especially glad I read this right on the tail end of reading all of Vonnegut, by the way.