Kabat to Release New Book in May

ANDES — Save the Date! Diamond Hollow Books invites you to celebrate the release of Jennifer Kabat's Nightshining: A Memoir in Four Floods (Milkweed Editions) on Saturday, May 3 from 5-7 pm. Jennifer will be in conversation with Iris Cushing, who also appears in the book. Location: The Andes Hotel Ballroom, 110 Main Street, Andes. Information 347-262-4187 or miles@diamondhollowbooks.com.

Pre-order your copy for pick-up from Diamond Hollow Books, or visit The Lost Bookshop, Delhi, or your favorite local bookseller! Books will also be available at the event.

Admission is Free but come early to secure a good seat or a table... 

Nightshining tells the story of the 1950 Rainmaker’s Flood that hit Andes and Margaretville after New York City used a Cold War weapon GE developed to end a drought, and also connects to the major flood of 2006 & to Hurricane Irene (2011), and their aftermaths.

Nightshining is a propulsive, layered examination of the conflict between the course of nature and human legacies of resistance and control. Floods, geoengineering, climate crisis. In herfirst 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.

Nightshining is the second half of a diptych, the first being The Eighth Moon, published in 2024.