Jennifer Kabat, author of The Eighth Moon, in conversation with Francesca Wade and Aaron Hicklin
When:
Thursday, May 16, 2024 7:00p -
8:00p
Thursday, May 16, 2024 7:00p -
8:00p
Where:
Porter Square Books
25 White St.
Cambridge, MA 02140
Admission:
FREE
Hosted by:
Categories:
Event website:
https://www.portersquarebooks.com/event/jennifer-kabat-author-eighth-moon-conversation-francesca-wade-and-aaron-hicklin
Porter Square Books is thrilled to welcome Jennifer Kabat for the release of her book The Eighth Moon! Francesca Wade and Aaron Hicklin will join Kabat in conversation. This event will take place on Thursday, May 16 at 7pm at Porter Square Books (25 White St. Cambridge, MA 02140).
RSVP here to let us know you're coming and to receive event updates!
ABOUT THE EIGHTH MOON
1845. The sky is blue, yet all is brown. I picture the scene from overhead: a silvered steel of violence, blood, beer, whiskey, and mutton. High, skidding clouds skip with excitement, eager to see what unfolds below. They cheer on the scene where men in dresses march."A rebellion, guns, and murder. When Jennifer Kabat moves to the Catskills in 2005, she has no idea it was the site of the Anti-Rent War, an early episode of American rural populism. Prompted to leave London following a mysterious illness that seems to be caused by life in the city itself, she finds in these ancient mountains--at once the northernmost part of Appalachia and a longtime refuge for New Yorkers--a place "where the land itself holds time."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. As the Great Recession sets in and a housing crisis looms, she supports herself with freelance work and adjunct teaching, slowly learning 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 Threaded with historical documents, the natural world, and the work of writers like Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick, Kabat weaves a capacious memoir, where the past comes alive in the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.
PRAISE FOR THE EIGHTH MOON
"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"
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
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.
Aaron Hicklin has been editor of three magazines in the U.S.—BlackBook (2003-2006), Out (2006-2018), and Document Journal. He is currently editor and publisher of Grand Journal, a biannual arts and literary magazine. He is the author of Boy Soldiers, and the editor of The Revolution Will Be Accessorized (Harper Collins), a collection of writing that appeared in BlackBook. He has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. In 2015 he founded One Grand Books, a bookstore curated by celebrated bibliophiles, with branches in the Catskills towns of Narrowsburg and Livingston Manor, NY.
Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London between the Wars (Faber & Faber, 2020), which was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. Her work proposes a form of biography centered on women’s lives, on collectivity and community, on recovering hidden histories, and on challenging the scripts by which lives are lived and stories are told. She is a 2023–2024 Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, where she is completing her second book, “Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife.”
