Aug 9 – Fog

Twenty years ago Kathryn Scanlan acquired a diary at a public estate auction. It was kept by Cora E. Lacy, an eighty-six-year-old woman living in a small Illinois town, from 1968 to 1972. Scanlan began to compulsively read and reread the stranger’s diary. In the years following she edited, arranged, and rearranged the diarists’ words into the composition that is Aug 9 – Fog.

Originally published in 2019, this is the first UK edition.

Praise for Aug 9 – Fog:

In Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9 – Fog, a notebook deteriorates beneath a ‘big red sun’, emanating a succession of moments and scenes that ‘tingle’, ‘glimmer’, and fail. This is the drenched Diary, crumbling when opened, a collection of ‘loose scrap notes’. ‘To read the diary is to be dropped into a life’, writes Scanlan, magnetising sentences into loose, strangely tender shapes. Is a paragraph a kind of chrysalis? The fog is burning off. We read towards that. – Bhanu Kapil, author of How To Wash A Heart

…in this unusual, finely judged and wrought work, [Kathryn Scanlan] has created beautifully resonant lines of what amounts to prose poetry out of the found diaries of an elderly stranger and in doing so has reminded us of the beauty that can be discovered in the ordinary and in ordinary speech. – Lydia Davis, author of Essays: One

If you ever wondered what life was about, if you ever felt yours was not ‘exciting’ enough, if you ever turned in vain to highbrow books that might tell you, then you should read this book, for the ordinary diaries of ordinary people will reassure you that yours is no different than anyone else’s—friends die, flowers come fast. This one, written half a century ago by an elderly woman, has been artfully arranged by Kathryn Scanlan to reveal the simplicity – and hidden poetry – of all our lives. – Mary Ruefle, author of My Private Property

Spare, sharp and moving, Kathryn Scanlan’s elegiac fragments lay bare the life of a woman, and the craft of a writer with unique and resonant style. As quiet as it is evocative, Aug 9 – Fog is a testimony to life as a labour of love, in prose that seems to live and breathe on its own. – Preti Taneja, author of Aftermath

The fleeting beauty and passing of a life; so simple, yet so poetically conjured through the sheer economy of carefully selected and scripted sentences and strings of words, all allowed their own space to breathe out fully on each page. I’ve never come across anything quite like it since, and don’t believe I ever will. – Magali Reus

Kathryn Scanlan performs a magic of lives made large and small by algorithmic degree… Aug 9 – Fog darkens intent and detail, insistent in its certainty that the project of mortality is not silence, but an exquisite scraping away at language to deepen the intimate pleasure that hums around the root of human pain. – Helen Marten

How does one strip the bark of a tree and feel its full, hidden verdant life? Kathryn Scanlan’s novelistic erasure feat is ’that puzzle a humdinger’ and her words are ‘beautiful sweaters’ that she has been stitching, unstitching, restitching, restricting, unrestricting from the wool and thread of an octogenarian diarist for the last decade or so. These Scanlan passages of life – you should take them with you wherever you go. – Vi Khi Nao, author of Sheep Machine

Elegant and unpretentious . . . [Aug 9 – Fog] grants every reader that simultaneous pull between mystery and intimacy . . . these barest clues—of new lights installed and tomatoes canned, tombstones bought and weeds tormented, a self-help book with a photograph from decades before tucked inside – are the ones that make us fall in love. – Nadja Spiegelman, The Paris Review