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"In a braided chronology, this debut memoir synchronizes the story of a move to rural Upstate New York with the Anti-Rent War of the nineteenth century"--
About the author
Jennifer Kabat received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism and has been published in BOMB and The Best American Essays. Her writing has also appeared in
Granta, Frieze, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review, and
The White Review. A finalist for the essay prize at Notting Hill Editions, she often collaborates with artists. She’s part of the core faculty in the Design Research MA at the School of Visual Arts. An apprentice herbalist, she lives in rural Upstate New York and serves on her volunteer fire department.
Summary
“Beautifully written, The Eighth Moon uses a very light touch to probe the most essential, unresolvable questions of belief, kinship, fidelity, history, and identity.”—Chris Kraus
A rebellion, guns, and murder. When Jennifer Kabat moves to the Catskills, she has no idea it was the site of the Anti-Rent War, an early episode of American rural populism.
As she forges friendships with her new neighbors and explores the countryside on logging roads and rutted lanes—finding meadows dotted with milkweed in bloom, saffron salamanders, a blood moon rising over Munsee, Oneida, and Mohawk land—she slowly learns of the 1840s uprising, when poor tenant farmers fought to redistribute their landlords’ vast estates. In the farmers’ socialist dreams, she discovers connections to her parents’ collectivist values, as well as to our current moment. Threaded with historical documents, the natural world, and the work of writers like Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick, Kabat weaves a capacious memoir, where the past comes alive in the present.
Rich with unexpected correspondences and discoveries, this visionary and deeply compassionate debut gives us a new way of seeing and being in place—one in which everything is intertwined and all at once.
Foreword
- Physical galley quantities available for major media, nonfiction media, environmental media, regional media, booksellers and librarians; digital galleys available for download on Edelweiss
- Media outreach to author’s contacts at major national outlets positioning this title as a singular book that weaves social, political and natural history together, for readers who want a nourishing reading experience in the midst of reactionary politics
- Advertising with NAIBA to target booksellers and readers on the East Coast
- Email marketing through the publisher to communities of more than 65K readers and buyers, with special push to academic market for course adoption
- Reader’s Guides available for download
- Author tour events in New York, Brooklyn, and Washington DC
