The Booksmith is excited to welcome Jennifer Kabat, Manjula Martin, and Daniel Gumbiner to the shop to celebrate the release of Nightshining on August 19th at 7pm. Join us!

About the book

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.

About the author

Manjula Martin is author of The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is coauthor of Fruit Trees for Every Garden, winner of the American Horticultural Society Book Award, and she edited the anthology Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. Martin is senior editor of ZYZZYVA and was previously managing editor of Zoetrope: All-Story. She lives in Northern California.

Daniel Gumbiner’s first book, The Boatbuilder, was nominated for the National Book Award and a finalist for the California Book Awards. His new novel, Fire in the Canyon, was a finalist for the California Book Awards and was also named a New Yorker Best Book of the Year. He is the Editor of The Believer and lives in San Francisco.

Jennifer Kabat is the author of the twinned memoirs The Eighth Moon and Nightshining published by Milkweed Editions in 2024 and 2025. She 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. Part of the core faculty in the Design Research MA at the School of Visual Arts, she lives in rural New York and serves on her volunteer fire department.

About the bookstore

The Booksmith is an independent bookstore located in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco since 1976.

Please note:

• Check-in for the event will begin at 6:45pm.
• Priced ticket holders will have seats held until 7pm. Arrivals after 7pm will be allowed admission, but seats are not guaranteed.
• General admission ticket holders will be offered seats at check-in on a first-come, first-served basis. May be standing room.
• Space at the door on the day of the event is usually available, but not guaranteed.
• ADA accessible. Bathrooms on site during event hours.
• Events typically end between 8:30 and 9pm.
• Questions? tickets@booksmith.com