The Eighth Moon - by Jennifer Kabat (Paperback)

About the Book

"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"--

Book Synopsis

"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 Threaded with historical documents, the natural world, and the work of writers like Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick, Kabat weaves a capacious memoir, where the past comes alive in the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.

Review Quotes

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

"Kabat's 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

"An essential read for anyone who's feeling lost in our new normal. You might find your new best friend in its pages."--Chicago Review of Books, "Best Books We Read This Year"

"Kabat's capacious, unclassifiable debut about history, politics, family and the land [. . .] discovering those histories via encounters with neighbors, archival research, the work of writers like Elizabeth Hardwick, and explorations of her new surroundings."--Phillip Pantuso, Times Union

"Kabat weaves a capacious memoir, where the past comes alive in the present."--Sarah Batkie, WORT Radio

"The Eighth Moon is a personal history of a place. Set in the Western Catskills in upstate New York, where Kabat moves from London seeking to repair her health, this researched memoir is written in the continuous present, bringing geologic events and Indigenous and white settlements into close perspective. [. . .] Throughout, she questions hierarchies of ownership amidst people, plants, and the land, while tracing the communal dreams of utopias and cooperative movements that happened nearby."--Amy Halloran, Civil Eats

"Beautifully written, The Eighth Moon uses a very light touch to probe the most essential, unresolvable questions of belief, kinship, fidelity, history, identity. It's one of the most remarkable, original books I've read in a long time."--Chris Kraus, author of Summer of Hate

"The Eighth Moon is infused with attention for the lands and art and bodies of the world. Reading it gave me moral stamina. Jennifer Kabat is a capacious and humane writer, and this book is required reading for anyone who wishes to live a principled life in a modern world."--Emmanuel Iduma, author of I Am Still with You

"The Eighth Moon moves with time-skipping logic, 'where the yet is always now, ' and where life is not a march of progress, but rather a circadian unfurling, dying back, going underground, and coming up again, slightly different. Kabat is both a stylist and a temporal magician. She cultivates a perspective that is as ethical as it is aesthetic because it provides a way of understanding ourselves not as main characters, but as dynamic collaborators with all that has happened, is happening, and will happen."--Adrian Shirk, author of Heaven Is a Place on Earth

"Kabat is a rural flaneur, probing for exit from capitalist endgame in this psychogeographical memoir of the Catskills. As political time collapses the events of her study into the present day, mysterious doors open into the possibility of an encounter across history with every risk attached, including that of renewal of our most elusive faith in one another. This is a sublime book."--Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel

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.